When night fell, a band of fifty determined men marched down the mountain towards the bridge, led by Seguier. Twenty of them were armed with guns and pistols. The rest carried scythes and hatchets. As they approached the village, they sang Marot's version of the seventy-fourth Psalm. The archpriest heard the unwonted sound as they came marching along. Thinking it was a nocturnal assembly, he cried to his soldiers, "Run and see what this means." But the doors of the house were already invested by the mountaineers, who shouted out for "The prisoners! the prisoners!" "Back, Huguenot canaille!" cried Chayla from the window. But they only shouted the louder for "The prisoners!"
The archpriest then directed the militia to fire, and one of the peasants fell dead. Infuriated, they seized the trunk of a tree, and using it as a battering-ram, at once broke in the door. They next proceeded to force the entrance to the dungeon, in which they succeeded, and called upon the prisoners to come forth. But some of them were so crippled by the tortures to which they had been subjected, that they could not stand. At sight of their sufferings the fury of the assailants increased, and, running up the staircase, they called out for the archpriest. "Burn the priest and the satellites of Baal!" cried their leader; and heaping together the soldiers' straw beds, the chairs, and other combustibles, they set the whole on fire.
Chayla, in the hope of escaping, jumped from a window into the garden, and in the fall broke his leg. The peasants discovered him by the light of the blazing dwelling. He called for mercy. "No," said Seguier, "only such mercy as you have shown to others;" and he struck him the first blow.
The others followed. "This for my father," said the next, "whom you racked to death!"
"This for my brother," said another, "whom you sent to the galleys!"
"This for my mother, who died of grief!"
This for my sister, my relatives, my friends, in exile, in prison, in misery!
And thus blow followed blow, fifty-two in all, half of which would probably have been mortal, and the detested Chayla lay a bleeding mass at their feet![Back to Contents]
Map of the Country of the Cevennes.
CHAPTER VI.
INSURRECTION OF THE CAMISARDS.
The poor peasants, wool-carders, and neatherds of the Cevennes, formed only a small and insignificant section of the great body of men who were about the same time engaged in different countries of Europe in vindicating the cause of civil and religious liberty. For this cause, a comparative handful of people in the Low Countries, occupying the Dutch United Provinces, had banded themselves together to resist the armies of Spain, then the most powerful monarchy in the world. The struggle had also for some time been in progress in England and Scotland, where it culminated in the Revolution of 1688; and it was still raging in the Vaudois valleys of Piedmont.
The object contended for in all these cases was the same. It was the vindication of human freedom against royal and sacerdotal despotism. It could only have been the direst necessity that drove a poor, scattered, unarmed peasantry, such as the people of the Cevennes, to take up arms against so powerful a sovereign as Louis XIV. Their passive resistance had lasted for fifteen long years, during which many of them had seen their kindred racked, hanged, or sent to the galleys; and at length their patience was exhausted, and the inevitable outburst took place. Yet they were at any moment ready to lay down their arms and return to their allegiance, provided only a reasonable degree of liberty of worship were assured to them. This, however, their misguided and bigoted monarch, would not tolerate; for he had sworn that no persons were to be suffered in his dominions save those who were of "the King's religion."
The circumstances accompanying the outbreak of the Protestant peasantry in the Cevennes in many respects resembled those which attended the rising of the Scotch Covenanters in 1679. Both were occasioned by the persistent attempts of men in power to enforce a particular form of religion at the point of the sword. The resisters of the policy were in both cases Calvinists;[37] and they were alike indomitable and obstinate in their assertion of the rights of conscience. They held that religion was a matter between man and his God, and not between man and his sovereign or the Pope. The peasantry in both cases persevered in their own form of worship. In Languedoc, the mountaineers of the Cevennes held their assemblies in "The Desert;" and in Scotland, the "hill-folk" of the West held their meetings on the muirs. In the one country as in the other, the monarchy sent out soldiers as their missionaries—Louis XIV. employing the dragoons of Louvois and Baville, and Charles II. those of Claverhouse and Dalzell. These failing, new instruments of torture were invented for their "conversion." But the people, in both cases, continued alike stubborn in their adherence to their own simple and, as some thought, uncouth form of faith.
The French Calvinist peasantry, like the Scotch, were great in their preachers and their prophets. Both devoted themselves with enthusiasm to psalmody, insomuch that "psalm-singers" was their nickname in both countries. The one had their Clement Marot by heart, the other their Sternhold and Hopkins. Huguenot prisoners in chains sang psalms in their dungeons, galley slaves sang them as they plied at the oar, fugitives in the halting-places of their flight, the condemned as they marched to the gallows, and the Camisards as they rushed into battle. It was said of the Covenanters that "they lived praying and preaching, and they died praying and fighting;" and the same might have been said of the Huguenot peasantry of the Cevennes.
The immediate cause of the outbreak of the insurrection in both countries was also similar. In the one case, it was the cruelty of the archpriest Chayla, the inventor of a new machine of torture called "the Squeezers,"[38] and in the other the cruelty of Archbishop Sharpe, the inventor of that horrible instrument called "the Iron Boot," that excited the fury of the people; and the murder of the one by Seguier and his band at Pont-de-Montvert, as of the other by Balfour of Burley and his companions on Magus Muir, proved the signal for a general insurrection of the peasantry in both countries. Both acts were of like atrocity; but they corresponded in character with the cruelties which had provoked them. Insurrections, like revolutions, are not made of rose-water. In such cases, action and reaction are equal; the violence of the oppressors usually finding its counterpart in the violence of the oppressed.
The insurrection of the French peasantry proved by far the most determined and protracted of the two; arising probably from the more difficult character of the mountain districts which they occupied and the quicker military instincts of the people, as well as because several of their early leaders and organizers were veteran soldiers who had served in many campaigns. The Scotch insurgents were suppressed by the English army under the Duke of Monmouth in less than two months after the original outbreak, though their cause eventually triumphed in the Revolution of 1688; whereas the peasantry of the Cevennes, though deprived of all extraneous help, continued to maintain a heroic struggle for several years, but were under the necessity of at last succumbing to the overpowering military force of Louis XIV., after which the Huguenots of France continued to be stamped out of sight, and apparently out of existence, for nearly a century.
In the preceding chapter, we left the archpriest Chayla a corpse at the feet of his murderers. Several of the soldiers found in the château were also killed, as well as the cook and house-steward, who had helped to torture the prisoners. But one of the domestics, and a soldier, who had treated them with kindness, were, at their intercession, pardoned and set at liberty. The corpses were brought together in the garden, and Seguier and his companions, kneeling round them—a grim and ghastly sight—sang psalms until daybreak, the uncouth harmony mingling with the crackling of the flames of the dwelling overhead, and the sullen roar of the river rushing under the neighbouring