royal proclamations.
The clergy had not solicited the edict, the work of an ambitious man
backed up by certain fanatics; they were at first embarrassed by it.
When the old hatreds revived, and the dangerous intoxications of power
had affected the souls of bishops and priests, the magistracy, who had
formerly been more severe towards the Reformers than even the
superintendents of the provinces had been, pronounced on many points in
favor of the persecuted; the judges were timid; the legislation, becoming
more and more oppressive, tied their hands; but the bias of their minds
was modified; it tended to extenuate, and not to aggravate, the effects
of the edict. The law was barbarous everywhere, the persecution became
so only at certain spots, owing to the zeal of the superintendents or
bishops; as usual, the south of France was the first to undergo all the
rigors of it. Emigration had ceased there for a long time past; whilst
the Norman or Dauphinese Reformers, on the revival of persecution, still
sought refuge on foreign soil, whilst Sweden, wasted by the wars of
Charles XII., invited the French Protestants into her midst, the peasants
of the Uvennes or of the Vivarais, passionately attached to the soil they
cultivated, bowed their heads, with a groan, to the storm, took refuge in
their rocks and their caverns, leaving the cottages deserted and the
harvests to be lost, returning to their houses and their fields as soon
as the soldiery were gone, ever faithful to the proscribed assemblies in
the desert, and praying God for the king, to whose enemies they refused
to give ear. Alberoni, and after him England, had sought to detach the
persecuted Protestants from their allegiance; the court was troubled at
this; they had not forgotten the Huguenot regiments at the battle of the
Boyne. From the depths of their hiding-places the pastors answered for
the fidelity of their flocks; the voice of the illustrious and learned
Basnage, for a long while a refugee in Holland, encouraged his brethren
in their heroic submission. As fast as the ministers died on the
gallows, new servants of God came forward to replace them, brought up in
the seminary which Antony Court had founded at Lausanne, and managed to
keep up by means of alms from Protestant Europe. It was there that the
most illustrious of the pastors of the desert, Paul Rabaut, already
married and father of one child, went to seek the instruction necessary
for the apostolic voca