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All the leaders of the dragonades, the Noailles, the Foucaults, the Basvilles, the Marillacs, complained bitterly of a measure that was useless to them as to the demolition of Protestant churches and the prohibition of worship, and very injurious as to the progress of conversions. They had counted on rooting out the worship by converting all the believers.
The series of persecutions which culminated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and ended with the dragonades under Louis XIV., drained France of her lifeblood. Other nations have profited by the treasures then cast out of her, and she has remained poor for want of them. Some of the best blood in America is of the old Huguenot stock. Huguenots carried arts and manufactures into England.
The chiefs of the dragonades judged it necessary to restrain the bad converts by making example of the obstinate; hence arose an inundation of horrors in which we see, as Saint Simon says, "the orthodox imitating against heretics the acts of pagan tyrants against confessors and martyrs."
During the last twenty years of the seventeenth century, the French Protestant emigration into Holland rose to a political event, and the first 'Dragonades' gave the signal in 1681.
Persuasive measures had indeed been frequently employed to win the deserters back to the ancient Church; but now under Louis's direction, a harsher course was attempted. The celebrated "dragonades" quartered a wild and licentious soldiery in Protestant localities, in the homes of Protestant house-owners, with special orders to make themselves offensive to their hosts.
Also was it a feather in his cap that at the time when the Gobelins factory was sighing and dying for lack of funds, the provincial factory of Beauvais not only remained prosperous, but opened its doors to many of the starving operatives from the Gobelins ateliers, thus saving them from the horrid fate of joining the Dragonades, as some of their fellows had done.
The Marquis de Louvois. His Portrait. The Marvels Which He Worked. The Le Tellier and the Mortemart. The King Destines De Mortemart to a Colbert. How One Manages Not to Bow. The Dragonades. A Necessary Man. Money Makes Fat. Meudon. The Horoscope. This journey to Flanders did not keep the King long away from his capital.
The Marquis de Louvois. His Portrait. The Marvels Which He Worked. The Le Tellier and the Mortemart. The King Destines De Mortemart to a Colbert. How One Manages Not to Bow. The Dragonades. A Necessary Man. Money Makes Fat. Meudon. The Horoscope. This journey to Flanders did not keep the King long away from his capital.
At Winchester still more violent measures were adopted. A large body of troops was marched into the town for the sole purpose of burdening and harassing the inhabitants. The town continued resolute; and the public voice loudly accused the King of imitating the worst crimes of his brother of France. The dragonades, it was said, had begun. There was indeed reason for alarm.
Or is it perchance an evangelical spirit, which breathes in Calvin's article: "That the heretic should be punished with death," and in the funeral pile of Servetus? Were the rack-chambers of Queen Elizabeth much more Christian than the dragonades of Louis XIV., and did Ireland live more happily under the yoke of a High Church forced upon her, than Spain under the Inquisition?
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