if you are unwilling to assent to this abjuration, none can argue you into it.”  “We are plain men, monseigneur; we are unwilling to do anything to which we cannot assent;” and they persisted in their refusal to abjure.  Cardinal Sadolet was summoned to Rome, and the premier president Chassaneuz died suddenly.  His successor, John de Maynier, Baron of Oppede, was a violent man, passionately bigoted, and moreover, it is said, a personal enemy of the Vaudians of Cabrieres, on which his estates bordered; he recommenced against them a persecution which was at first covert; they had found protectors in Switzerland and in Germany; at the instance of Calvin, the Swiss Protestant cantons and the German princes assembled at Smalkalden wrote to Francis I. in their favor; it was to his interest to humor the Protestants of Germany, and that fact turned out to the advantage of the Vaudians of Provence; on the 14th of June, 1544, he issued an edict which, suspending the proceedings commenced against them, restored to them their privileges, and ordered such of them as were prisoners to be set at large; “and as the attorney-general of Provence,” it goes on to say, “is related to the Archbishop of Aix, their sworn enemy, there will be sent in his place a counsellor of the court for to inform me of their innocence.”  But some months later the peace of Crespy was made; and Francis I. felt no longer the same solicitude about humoring the Protestants of Switzerland and Germany.  Baron d’Oppede zealously resumed his work against the Vaudians; he accused them of intriguing; with foreign Reformers, and of designing to raise fifteen thousand men to surprise Marseilles and form Provence into a republic.  On the 1st of January, 1545, Francis I. signed, without reading it they say, the revocation of his edict of 1544, and ordered execution of the decree issued by the Parliament of Aix, dated November 18, 1540, on the subject of the Vaudians, “notwithstanding all letters of grace posterior to that epoch, and ordered the governor of the province to give, for that purpose, the assistance of the strong hand to justice.”  The duty of assisting justice was assigned to Baron d’Oppede; and from the 7th to the 25th of April, 1545, two columns of troops, under the orders, respectively, of Oppede himself and Baron de la Garde, ravaged with fire and sword the three districts of Merindol, Cabrieres, and La Coste, which were peopled chiefly by Vaudians.

[Illustration:  Massacre of the Vaudians——­218]

We shrink from describing in detail all the horrors committed against a population without any means of self-defence by troops giving free rein to their brutal passions and gratifying the hateful passions of their leaders.  In the end three small towns and twenty-two villages were completely sacked; seven hundred and sixty-three houses, eighty-nine cattle-sheds, and thirty-one barns burned; three thousand persons massacred; two hundred and fifty-five executed subsequently to the massacre, after a mockery of trial; six or seven hundred sent to the galleys; many children sold for slaves; and the victors, on retiring, left behind them a double ordinance, from the Parliament of Aix and the vice-legate of Avignon, dated the 24th of April, 1545, forbidding “that any one, on pain of death, should dare to give asylum, aid, or succor, or furnish money or victuals, to any Vaudian or heretic.”