This taints all his introductory chapters on the religious wars in France, prior to 1572, giving a false light and color to the whole. It gives the impression that real piety, devotion, religious feeling, were not to be found at all among the Catholics of France, but were the peculiar attributes of the disciples gained by the emissaries sent from Geneva by Calvin.
Biassing the reader thus, he keeps back the real exterminating, destructive, and intolerant spirit of the Huguenots, and, while detailing here and there excesses, treats as insignificant the conspiracy of Amboise, Coligny's complicity in Poltrot's assassination of the Duke of Guise, Queen Jane's ruthless extirpation of Catholicity, the Michelade, and the fearful butchery enacted by Montgomery at Orthez, a small place where, nevertheless, the Catholic victims numbered, according to his own figures, three thousand, halt what he claims as the number of Protestant victims at Paris on the bloody day of St. Bartholomew.
Nor is he more happy in depicting the theories and ideas of the two parties.
Compare the Protestants in France with the early Christians and the difference will be seen. The Reformers everywhere were aggressive and intolerant. They did not ask merely liberty to adopt new religious views and practise them. They did, indeed, raise the cry of religious freedom--freedom of worship--freedom of conscience; but what did these words really mean? They meant the suppression of the Catholic worship, the extermination of the priesthood and religious orders, the pillage and defacing of Catholic churches, and the destruction of paintings, statues, relics, and crosses. When this was done, they proclaimed religious liberty. Thus, at Lyons, in 1562, "the Mass was abolished, liberty of conscience proclaimed," in two consecutive clauses.
The utter absurdity of such a connection does not strike Mr. White, nor will it strike many English readers as it does a Catholic ear. The Protestant spirit has so falsified ideas that we constantly hear the same inconsistency. The enthusiastic son of New England claims that the Puritan fathers established "freedom to worship God according to the dictates of conscience," when, in fact, they claimed only the right to worship for themselves and denied it to all others; the son of Rhode Island claims Roger Williams as the real founder of toleration, and yet his fanatical opposition to the slightest semblance to Catholicity was such that he exhorted the trained bands not to march under the English flag because it had the cross on it; the historian of New York, or the more elaborate historian of the Netherlands, will claim for Holland the honor of establishing religious freedom, and we read their pages with the impression that the people of the Netherlands were Protestant, as a unit; and that the republic established after throwing off the Spanish yoke made the land one where all creeds met in harmony, and all men were equal in the eye of the law in their religious rights. Yet what is the real fact? From that time till the present nearly one half of the people of the Netherlands have been Catholics. The Protestants, possessing a slight numerical advantage, ruled, and to the Catholics their rule was one of iron. They were deprived of all churches, prohibited from erecting others, confined to certain quarters, subjected to penal laws. Where then was the freedom of worship? In the reformers' minds these words had no application to Catholics.