The Illuminati Illuminated, Part One: The Order's Origins

Four years ago, when Donald Trump was campaigning for the office of President, he ran on the idea that, as an outsider, he was best suited to clean up corruption in government, and he complained that, because of this, all the forces of establishment politics were arrayed against him. While this may have been true during the Republican primaries, it certainly was no longer the truth following his nomination, after which his party fell in line behind him as if he’d always been their first choice. Politics as usual. However, Trump never gave up his claims that an entrenched bureaucracy was sabotaging him and preventing him from doing the will of his constituents—an odd claim when he and his party held the executive office, the majority in both houses of Congress, and made history with the number of conservative judges they were appointing to federal courts and the Supreme Court. With what looked like a growing dominance over every branch of our government, it seems absurd to complain about his power being blocked. Nevertheless, every time something leaked from his administration or whenever one of his own was indicted for the very kind of corruption he had run on rooting out, his supporters blamed it on a so-called “deep state,” a kind of shadow government sabotaging their outsider president and limiting what he could do. Soon, Trump himself, already known to favor and amplify conspiracy theories like birtherism, climate change denialism, and anti-vaccination claims—began to use the term “deep state” to describe the nebulous forces he and his supporters claimed were actively foiling him. But the term did not originate here. It was originally used to describe those loyal to the secular nationalism of Turkey, who engage in violent resistance to the ruling party of President Tayyip Erdoğan. While in Turkey it refers to an actual conspiratorial network that did not shrink from murder, in America, it is used to refer to any resistance, from leakers in their own employ to negative press, none of which is uncommon or conspiratorial. Emails in which career bureaucrats expressed negative opinions of the new President were held up as proof of a plot against him, despite the fact that any new administration has to deal with holdovers from previous administrations who often don’t care for the new boss. None of this is proof of conspiracy, but that hasn’t stopped the conspiracy mongering during the last four years, which has seen the conservative conspiracy machine operated by such organizations as The John Birch Society folding this conspiracy into their already unwieldy conspiratorial view of world politics and history, suggesting this “Deep State” is just the façade of an even deeper state, composed of political think tanks and economic conferences, like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group, and the Trilateral Commission, and beyond them influential banking families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. And if you keep pulling back the curtain, they say, you’ll find an old and insidious conspiracy, one responsible for all the major political upheavals of the modern age: the Illuminati.

*

I have covered historical conspiracy theories before, including the survival of the Templars in a patron exclusive podcast minisode, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in a lengthy series, and numerous posts that address aspects of the false Jewish World Conspiracy theory. Perhaps only the last of these could possibly rival the scope of the claims about the Illuminati, and even then, it’s unclear that they can be separated. Certainly, Illuminati conspiracy theories contributed to the claims of a worldwide Jewish plot, but there are also claims that it preceded any such plots. Some conspiracists who argue that the Illuminati are bent on the subversion of all governments and the destruction of religion will claim that the Illuminati can be traced all the way back to antiquity, to the sorcerous magi of old, and the Gnostic secret societies within early Christianity that seemed bent on perverting orthodox doctrines. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, luckily I did episodes earlier this year about the Zoroastrian magi and Gnosticism that you can listen to for context. However, to simplify things, I can tell you that the Illuminati, first of all, were very real, and their origins, along with the origins of modern conspiracy theory as we know it, can be traced back to Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, in the late 18th century. Because of this, my recent series on miracles purported to have occurred in Enlightenment France also serves as a perfect backdrop to this series. Also called the Age of Reason, this period is characterized by the spread of the philosophical notions that reason is the key to knowledge and that liberty is a human right. These beliefs led many to rebel against absolute monarchy as a system of government and to throw off the yoke of traditional religion. Thus we see the revolutions of the American colonies as well as the French Revolution in these years as an organic response to specific grievances as well as a swing toward ideals of freedom and democracy. But this was a time of frightening and sudden change, especially for the more conservative of the era. Many were looking for some simpler explanation of what was behind the violent upsets of established order that they saw transpiring around them. In 1797, almost a decade after the start of the French Revolution and nearly simultaneously, two books appeared, each written without knowledge of the other, that offered many the explanation for which they yearned. A French Jesuit priest named Abbé Augustin Barruel published his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, and Scottish Professor of Natural Philosophy John Robison published his Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, both of which argued that a theretofore obscure secret society called the Illuminati was the prime mover responsible for the bloody revolution in France.

A cartoon that illustrates what many thought of the Age of Reason at the time. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe it stretches the imagination that these nearly identical theories appeared simultaneously, but it appears they did, much as the theory of evolution occurred separately to both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace during the same years, but in this case it is not because the theory was accurate. That is not to say that this secret society was made up, though. Far from it. The Illuminati did exist, and not everything that Barruel and Robison claimed about their intentions can be dismissed as false. What we know is that the Order of the Illuminati was founded in the university town of Ingolstadt, in the Electorate of Bavaria, in 1776. Now before that year sends any of you spiraling into conspiracy theories about Illuminist Founding Fathers in America, let me assure you that in that year, it was but a fledgling club, with few members from recruited mostly from among the university student body. There are claims that the Illuminati eventually reached U.S. shores, though, and I’ll address those later, in part two of this series. At the time of its creation, its originator, a young Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt, Adam Weishaupt, who had dreamed up the order before his thirtieth year, conceived of it as a tool for spreading Enlightenment ideals, a remedy for the twin evils of ignorance and superstition that plagued humanity. The idea was to create a network of likeminded men who were in influential positions, such as advisors to sovereign rulers, who could quietly whisper to the leaders of this world, pushing them and therefore everyone, away from vice and toward virtue, with an eye to remaking the social order according to republican principles and attaining liberty for all peoples.

These appear to have been the Order’s objectives when Weishaupt first discussed it with friends, back when he was still toying with calling them the Perfectibilists, a name which further indicates his desire for the betterment of the world. However, Weishaupt also believed that those in power would work against these ends, and so his idea was to work in secret, through a society structured like the Freemasons, with numerous degrees to keep secrets from all but the innermost circle, but designed more like the Jesuits, who centralized power in one man, which would be Weishaupt himself, Rex or king of the Illuminati—an ironic structure since the group’s stated objectives were to do away with such clerical authority and absolute power structures. At first, slow to spread and with few members of any influence, Weishaupt’s endeavor seemed doomed to failure, but then he met Baron Adolph von Knigge, who had some influence in Masonic circles and took an interest in the goals of Weishaupt’s Illuminati. It was resolved that, in order to accomplish their goals, they would need to essentially appropriate the existing infrastructure of the Freemasons, by presenting Illuminism as the final uppermost degree of Masonry to be attained, at which the true aims of the Freemasons would be revealed—a kind of top-down hostile takeover of Continental Freemasonry. This Baron von Knigge set about doing, travelling around to lodges throughout Europe and initiating Masons into the Illuminati until the numbers of Weishaupt’s order finally began to swell, and its reach to spread.

Portrait of Weishaupt. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

According to Abbé Barruel, the conspiracy really started before the organization of the Illuminati, though, with the writings of the philosophes of the French Academy. He argued that Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot had commenced the plot with their popular writings advocating for reason and progress and denouncing organized religion. Indeed, Barruel had been a vocal critic of the philosophes long before the French Revolution and the formulation of his grand conspiracy theory. Rather than seeing them as proponents of liberty and equality, he believed them to be a band of rabble-rousers fomenting unrest by redefining words like reason and terms like public opinion in an effort to undermine hierarchy and make the will of the populace sovereign, which was tantamount to treason. While most of these thinkers were Deists, meaning that rather than espousing a particular religion they instead arrived at a belief in a creator god based on observation and reason, to Barruel and many other clergy, this was only atheism under a different name, so he saw the destruction of Christianity as part and parcel of the plot of the philosophes, making them, quite literally, anti-Christ. While Barruel was not the only person to suggest that the philosophes contributed to the revolutionary ideology of the Jacobins and other revolutionary groups in France—indeed this is widely agreed upon—he appears to be the first to suggest that the public politics their philosophy helped bring forth could not have possibly evolved organically from ideas in the zeitgeist but rather must have been a premeditated ploy thrust upon the public by wicked academics bent on overturning the natural order. Likewise, Robison was not the only observer at the time or since to suggest the organizational structures and memberships of French Freemasonry might have overlapped or provided a framework for the revolutionary clubs like the Jacobins, but he and Barruel were alone in seeing a concerted and premeditated plot by the Freemasons to manipulate the masses and incite them to revolt, not for the Enlightenment principles they preached but in reality to achieve their own secret ends. And certainly unique was the addition of the Illuminati as the central command, inspired by the philosophes to transform the world into a place with no order, no law, no religion, insinuating their way like a parasite into the massive lodge system of the Freemasons and through them playing the public like a puppet. By their reckoning, the Illuminati, through the Freemasons, made real the impious and apocalyptic dreams of the philosophes by overthrowing both church and state, toppling altar and throne alike to usher in a new age of chaos and bloodshed.

Much of what Barruel and Robison claimed cannot in good faith be denied. First, Adam Weishaupt and the likeminded men he initiated into his order were certainly inspired by the Enlightenment ideals of the philosophes and other modern thinkers. Even their name, Illuminati, the illuminated or enlightened ones, seems to be a reflection of their Enlightenment principles. But more than this, their practices and stated goals were not as innocent as many apologists and debunkers often suggest in their efforts to discredit Barruel and Robison’s theories. The fact of the matter is that the public was eventually made privy to the innermost secret intentions of the Order of the Illuminati. In 1785, Charles Theodore, the Elector of Bavaria, concerned about the power wielded by secret societies whose memberships included many influential persons, outlawed all such orders. It was not long before the Illuminati came to his attention. According to Barruel, this transpired because a high-ranking member happened to be struck by lightning, and on his smoking body were found numerous papers and communiques that revealed the Illuminati and their plans. This story of Barruel’s isn’t supported anywhere else, though, and could well be fiction. Regardless, it is clear that, once the Elector began his campaign against secret societies, some low-ranking members betrayed the order out of resentment for never being raised to higher degrees, and soon raids were being conducted on members of Weishaupt’s inner circle. It wasn’t long before their papers were being published for all of Bavaria to read, and rather than revealing that they were just an idealistic group innocently promoting egalitarian ideals, they showed that they really were nefarious and deserved to be suppressed. Among the lower order members, they may have represented their aims as being this innocuous—to serve as a positive influence on mankind, especially to those in power, to encourage benevolence and discourage fanaticism—but among the inner circle, they emphasized a further end of establishing a world that had no need for monarchs and magistrates, princes and priests. While to many today this still seems a noble goal, the very fact that they kept their true objectives a secret even from their underlings goes to show that they were an untrustworthy group. Indeed, their papers show that they did not shrink from recommending criminal acts to seize power for their cause, like having members who were close to government officials steal and copy their seals in order to facilitate forgery. Their lofty ideals were tarnished by the very fact that they believed they could only be realized through manipulation and deceit. Believing that they knew better than the people what the people needed turned their democratic crusade into a plot for authoritarian control.

Portrait of Augustin Barruel. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Thus in 1785, four years before the French Revolution, the Order of the Illuminati was crushed, and Weishaupt and his lieutenants found themselves exiled. This turn of events serves as the central evidence against Barruel and Robison’s theses. The Illuminati had been shut down, its leaders scattered and forced into retirement, long before the events attributed to them in France. Weishaupt himself just devoted himself to writing various screeds defending his former endeavor, no longer even pretending at secrecy. And the very fact that he could not keep his order’s existence or its schemes a secret in Bavaria, whether because of a random act of god smiting someone with lightning or because of treachery from within, serves to demonstrate that a conspiracy of such a size is doomed to be revealed, and not by lone theorists in manifestos. Barruel and Robison claimed that the Illuminati had survived their exposure and suppression, but they offered no evidence. Indeed, using the telltale circular reasoning of a paranoid, they suggested that the very fact that there was no evidence of the conspiracy served as evidence of its existence. And beyond this conjecture presented as fact, Barruel and Robison also misrepresented the Illuminati’s objectives and practices in numerous ways. For example, even in their secret writings, the Illuminati did not encourage the incitement of violence. They intended to surround the powerful with men who would guide them toward establishing a perfect world, a global community, a eutopia, and they were very specific that revolutions were not to be fomented, as those simply replace one tyranny with another. They believed that wise counsel should have no recourse to violence. They did indeed seek a dramatic change in world order, abolishing property and authority, but they saw government as serving a role like that of a parent, necessary at first, but to be outgrown. In the case of humanity, they did not anticipate that these changes would happen for thousands of years and certainly did not intend to precipitate a hasty and violent reform. Barruel would argue that the truly evil plots were not made known beyond the highest degrees, but in truth, when Baron Knigge traveled among the Masonic lodges of Europe trying to grow their numbers, he readily offered the highest degrees in order to tempt Freemasons into the fold. Still, Abbé Barruel insisted, there were even higher degrees than the papers and testimonies revealed, the degree of the Magi, he called them, trying to conjure images of occult evil, and it was in those degrees, he assured his readers, that the really evil stuff happened. But there is no evidence of this.

All these things have been pointed out since the time Barruel’s and Robison’s books were published, in such authoritative refutations as Jean Joseph Mounier’s On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati, on the Revolution of France. Works such as this, and the continuing empirical scholarship of history that helps us understand more and more all the various contributing factors that culminated in the French Revolution, are why no serious historian entertains Barruel’s or Robison’s theories today, and why anyone who still relies on them as an academic proof of an Illuminati conspiracy theory is an outlier pretending at genuine historical analysis. If you challenge them on the reliability of these sources, they will likely resort to even wider conspiracy theories and suggest that historians everywhere are in on the plot to discredit Barruel and Robison. But the fact of the matter is that Barruel and Robison discredited themselves. As stated, Barruel was already a rabid opponent of the philosophes with an axe to grind, especially after the French Revolution forced him, as a clergyman, out of the country. He could not admit that the revolution had been a genuine grassroots phenomenon or that church and throne had done anything to precipitate it, so a shadowy cabal of godless provocateurs was the only natural answer. And when none of the Illuminati papers revealed an atheistic tenet, he said it must have been a closely held secret atheism, and he even, according to Mounier, mistranslated a passage discussing how to appeal to initiates that were enthusiasts of the theosophy of Swedenborg and Rosicrucianism, representing it instead as being about how to initiate people who suffer from “the fantasy of believing in God.” Mournier suggests this error is so egregious that either Barruel’s grasp of German was so tenuous that we cannot trust any of his analysis of Illuminati papers, or he was translating unfaithfully, and thus deceptively. As for Robison, he had previously been a man of strong reputation in the scientific community, but ever since a debilitating groin spasm had sent him into torturous isolation and drove him to abusing opium, he was known to suffer from paranoia and depression. It was in this state, that he read the constant barrage of news on the French Revolution. Add to this his resentment of French thinkers like Antoine Lavoisier who were revolutionizing Robison’s field of chemistry with notions that didn’t leave much room for God, and we have another reactionary seeing plots to overturn the natural order. Being a Freemason himself, and having visited Continental lodges and disliked the brand of Enlightenment atheism and licentious behavior he saw there, secret societies became a natural component of his theory, one that, as with Barruel, might reflect more on his own prejudices.

Portrait of John Robison. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Despite the credibility issues of these authors and their books, the Illuminati conspiracy theory of the French Revolution gained quite a bit of traction among conservatives in Britain. When one considers why this was, though, it becomes clear that they were drawn to the theory for the same reasons that Robison and Barruel concocted it: namely that it jibed well with their prejudices and provided a simpler explanation than the messy reality. British conservatives harbored their own distaste for the philosophes of the French Academy, preferring to lionize their homegrown philosophers like Roger Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, who always kept God at the center of their philosophy. The suggestion that the Enlightenment philosophers of France were actually demoniacal agents of evil struck them as reasonable because of the disdain in which they already held them. Moreover, this view of a diabolical conspiracy to overthrow God’s ordained systems of governance gave them ammunition against their own political opponents at home. Thus when the Society of United Irishmen, inspired by revolutionary movements abroad, rose up against British rule, conservatives declared that the Illuminati had stirred up yet another club of Jacobins, this time in their own backyard. And when a group of vocal advocates for women’s rights emerged under the leadership of Mary Wollstonecraft, they declared them to be “Illuminata,” or female adepts of the order, bent on seducing all British women into depravity as part of their grand conspiracy to overthrow all moral standards. In their minds, as in the minds of most conspiracy theorists, nothing ever just happens, at least not the things with which they’re uncomfortable. There are no liberal or progressive tendencies. People don’t just stand up for their rights, or for change, not even because they are inspired by others who have done the same. Instead, they must be pawns moved by the devil’s own hand.

There are more than a few reasons that a historian might cite to disprove the Illuminati theory of the French Revolution, such as all the social and cultural dominos that fell in the decades beforehand, some of the earliest of which I discussed in my series on the Old Regime’s response to Jansenist miracles. And if it does no good to cite the specific failures of the Old Regime to handle particular crises as an explanation for the grievances and motivations of revolutionaries, then there are the facts about philosophes about whom much has been written and Barruel and Robison are poor sources of information about them. For example, many philosophes, such as Voltaire, were sympathetic to and even had close ties with the monarchy and did not want to see them abolished; the most influential, including Voltaire and Rousseau, actually passed away years before the revolution; and numerous Enlightenment scientists, many of whom were also Freemasons, found themselves in the guillotine as well, including Robison’s hated Antoine Lavoisier. Indeed, this conspiracy theory struggles to explain why so many of the initial instigators and later influential figures in the Revolution ended up themselves being victims of their own revolution except to claim that they must have only been pawns as well and not above the fray like the Illuminati prime movers. To many who believe theories like these, it seems a simpler explanation, and in a way it is. Some will even cite Occam’s razor and claim their theory must be true because it is a simpler explanation. In truth, Occam’s razor actually states that among competing hypotheses, one should err on the side of the one with the fewest assumptions. By that yardstick, grand unifying conspiracy theories like this fail miserably. Yet they remain appealing. Psychologists will suggest that it is due to cognitive biases like proportionality bias, which causes one to assume that events with massive implications and effects, like the French Revolution, must have some equally massive cause or must have been caused purposely. Others will say that we are hardwired, through adaptation for survival because of so much time spent scanning our surroundings for danger, to find patterns, and so we sometimes see enemies that aren’t there. Confirmation bias predisposes us to believe a theory that reinforces our existing beliefs, as we have seen was the case among British conservatives, and may also be the case among conservative conspiracy theorists in America today.

In part 2, we will look further into how this theory of a powerful Illuminati conspiracy reached America and changed forever our culture and politics.

Cartoon illustrating the conservative view of the French Revolution. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Barruel, Augustin. Memoirs Illustrating The History Of Jacobinism. American Council on Economics and Society, 1995. Internet Archive, archive.org/stream/BarruelMemoirsIllustratingTheHistoryOfJacobinism/barruel+Memoirs+Illustrating+the+History+of+Jacobinism_djvu.txt.

Graham, David A. “There Is No American ‘Deep State.’” The Atlantic, 20 Feb. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/why-its-dangerous-to-talk-about-a-deep-state/517221/.

Hafford, Michael. “Deep State: Inside Donald Trump’s Paranoid Conspiracy Theory.” Rolling Stone, 9 March, 2017, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/deep-state-inside-donald-trumps-paranoid-conspiracy-theory-124236/.

Hofman, Amos. “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel's Theory of Conspiracy.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, pp. 27–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2739276. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Jay, Mike. “Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy.” The Public Domain Review, 2 April 2014, publicdomainreview.org/essay/darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy.

Mounier, J. J. On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati on the Revolution of France. W. and C Spilsbury, 1801. HathiTrust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101007617051&view=1up&seq=5.

Robison, John. Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. T. Dobson, 1798. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/47605/47605-h/47605-h.htm.

Taylor, Michael. “British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797–1802.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2014, pp. 293–312. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24690289. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

The Murder of Lord Darnley, Part Two: The Casket Letters (A Royal Blood Mystery)

At the christening of her and Lord Darnley’s son, on the 17th of December, 1566, Mary, Queen of Scots, seemed on the eve of accomplishing everything she had set out to accomplish since her return to Scotland. The christening was a grand affair, with all her noblemen present at the chapel royal in Stirling, in new finery that she had gifted them, for a Catholic ceremony that kicked off days of opulent celebration. Mary seemed to have recovered from her recent illness—rumored to have been a poisoning—or at least to be putting on a good face in spite of any continued suffering, and her mood must have been elevated by some good news. Just the day before, an envoy from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, arrived and informed her that the English monarch was finally willing to meet with Mary to negotiate her right of succession to the English throne. However, there were still manifold reasons to be uneasy. First, the archbishop performing the baptism was said to suffer from a pox, so Mary insisted he forgo the customary part of the ceremony in which he spit into the baby’s mouth. Second, her Protestant lords frowned upon the Catholic ceremony and refused to enter the chapel, among them her half-brother the Earl of Moray and even her stalwart supporter and advisor the Earl of Bothwell. Last and most scandalous was the absence of the king, her consort, Lord Darnley, who had travelled to Stirling but refused to attend the ceremony. There had been much talk of Lord Darnley conspiring against her during her illness, and this very public slight left Mary gloomy and brooding between smiles for her guests. Was she changing her mind about the options to rid herself of Lord Darnley at which her lords had lately hinted at Craigmillar? If so, some weeks later, when Lord Darnley himself became ill, she seems to have softened in her attitude toward him. He had run off to Glasgow with rumored plans of fleeing the country to gather some foreign power to his cause, but was struck down with some kind of pustules and wracking pains. It is not clear what illness laid the king so low. Some scholars suggest it was smallpox, while others argue that the majority of the evidence points to syphilis. Of course, at the time, as when Mary had been ill, suspicions were that Darnley had been poisoned, perhaps in retaliation. Darnley, however, doesn’t seem to have thought so, for he begged Mary to come and visit him, and Mary did, confronting him about his scheming against her and holding out the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation if he would return to Edinburgh with her. Darnley agreed and allowed himself to be carried back on a litter. It is said that a singular raven followed them all the way back to Edinburgh, perhaps a dark omen of what lay at the end of this journey for Darnley. The intention was to install the king at the well-fortified Craigmillar Castle to convalesce, but Darnley didn’t want to stay there, so instead they made their way to Kirk o’Field, where Darnley would meet his final fate, and as they installed the king in his lodgings, the raven that had followed them from Glasgow made its perch on the soon-to-be-demolished building’s rooftop. What were Mary’s intentions in bringing Darnley back to the vipers’ nest that was Edinburgh, where all his enemies would surround him? Was she trying to mend their marriage, or was she playing her part in a murder plot as would later be alleged?

Lord Darnley’s lodgings exploded in February 1567, but his barely clothed body was found in an adjacent garden without a mark on it, with a variety of unscorched items—a chair, a quilt or cloak, a slipper, and a dagger—strewn about him. Beyond the strangeness of this crime scene, there were further details the night before the blast and just after the explosion that must be scrutinized. When Mary had come to see Darnley earlier in the evening, dressed for the masquerade she was later to attend at the palace, she had with her a number of lords who were proven enemies of the king, leading some recent writers to suggest that Darnley himself had planned the explosion as a means of killing his rivals and perhaps Mary as well, and that he was afterward killed in the garden for his actions. But it doesn’t appear that Darnley had any foreknowledge that those lords would visit that night, and by the time the explosion occurred, he certainly knew that no one was around but himself and his servants. Now the idea that whoever prepared the gunpowder that destroyed the lodgings had in mind to murder Mary as well as Darnley is a possibility, since her plans had been to sleep there, not in Darnley’s chambers but in her own, below his, and she only changed her mind when the hour had drawn too late for her to make a suitable appearance at the masquerade and return. Or as her accusers would later spin it, this was her excuse for departing, knowing full well that the powder hidden below would detonate that night. The story of this plot is absolutely obscured in gossip and conflicting testimonies from those accused of being involved, but Mary’s accusers would later assert that the gunpowder had been smuggled into the queen’s chambers below Darnley’s, in a big pile, which could indicate Mary’s involvement, as the plotters wouldn’t have dumped gunpowder in her room if she were planning on retiring there. However, the fact that the building was entirely leveled would seem to indicate gunpowder had been placed among the foundations, perhaps in packed into barrels. Curiously, as Mary made to depart for her masquerade that evening, she noticed that the face of one of her valets, who had previously been Bothwell’s servant, had been blackened, and she commented on how begrimed he looked, to which he only turned red and made no answer. This is a recollection of Mary’s after the fact, but as it would seem to implicate not only herself, as the valet’s mistress, but also Bothwell, whom she was later to defend in the matter, it seems we can trust that it happened, and if we can trust this, it helps exonerate Mary, for if she were aware of a gunpowder plot, she certainly wouldn’t have commented on the sight of her servant being covered in gunpowder. As for Bothwell, this begrimed former servant would not be the last clue of his involvement.

A contemporary sketch of the murder scene at Kirk O’Field. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Just before the explosion decimated the king’s lodging at Kirk o’Field, some lodgers staying near the orchard and garden adjacent to Kirk o’Field heard a man’s voice crying in despair, saying, “Pity me, kinsmen, for the love of Him who had pity on all the world!” Thus, in what may have been Lord Darnley’s final words, he once again acted the pious penitent, appealing fruitlessly to his assassins’ faith. Around this time, a local woman was woken up by the sounds of men running up her street. This would seem to indicate that Darnley had discovered he was in danger, perhaps because he also heard men outside his lodgings, or because he actually somehow discovered the gunpowder, and that he fled, maybe by climbing out a window into the garden with his servant, carrying some of the items that were found with them. Then the men heard running might have seen his escape and pursued him into the garden, where they killed him. Many theoretical versions of the murder had it that Darnley was strangled, but without a mark on him, it is more likely he was smothered, perhaps with the quilt found near him. So then the explosion seems superfluous, unless it was to destroy evidence. Nevertheless, at around 2am, the explosion did happen, so perhaps a fuse had already been lit and the deed could not be undone. Immediately after the blast, two other women, who were on the street, witnessed a group of eleven men running from the area. One of these women tried to grab hold of one of the men to ask where the sound of the explosion had come from, but the man shook off her hand and the group ran on, dividing in half and fleeing in two separate directions. These would seem to be the assassins themselves, as they weren’t described as members of the night watch, who would not be on the scene for a little while longer. Certainly one of the women who saw them thought them suspicious, for she called after them, “Traitors! You have been at some evil turn!” When the night’s watch did show up, they found a man under Bothwell’s command, Captain William Blackadder, already at the scene. This man’s presence was the first thing to implicate the Earl of Bothwell in the king’s murder, and soon, as the queen came to rely more and more on Bothwell’s counsel and defend him from the allegations of his involvement in the murder plot, the rumors took further shape, not only that Bothwell was behind the king’s murder but that he afterward had become, and perhaps previously had been, Mary’s lover.

The power of the Earl of Bothwell cannot be underestimated and must be considered when examining him as a suspect in the murder. The reason that the other Protestant lords and the English feared Bothwell’s return to Scotland during the Chaseabout Raid rebellion is that they understood how his support would strengthen Mary. He was Lord High Admiral of the Royal Scots Navy, and he had the support of many border clans, which meant military strength on land or sea. Such was Bothwell’s power that, when he had the queen’s favor, his rival lords believed him the chief threat to their own ascendancy. It is therefore understandable that they had wanted to see him thrown under the bus, as it were, for the murder plot, even though, if Bothwell did sign a bond at Craigmillar late in 1566 to undertake the king’s assassination, then surely he was not the only lord undersigned. So one wonders whether it was the people themselves or other lords, perhaps some of them among the conspirators, who were behind the smear campaign that commenced before a month was past, with placards placed anonymously on the doors of churches suggesting that Bothwell had murdered the king with an eye to marrying the queen, and that he had even poisoned his own wife to get her out of the way. As will be seen, there is certainly truth to Bothwell having designs on marrying the queen, but as for the rest of the allegations, no evidence seems to exist that supports them. Moreover, less than two months after the murder, Bothwell was indicted for involvement in the murder, stood trial, and was acquitted. Later accusers would suggest the jury was stacked in his favor, but Alison Weir, in my principal source, Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley, goes name by name through the jury to demonstrate that this was not the case. Throughout the trial and afterward, Bothwell remained the Queen’s favorite, which would appear to indicate she did not believe the allegations… or that she knew him to be guilty and defended him anyway… perhaps because she had conspired in the act herself.

James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In Part One, I called the accusation made by Mary’s half-brother that the Earl of Bothwell planned to abduct the queen and hold her as a sex slave absurd, and certainly it must have seemed ridiculous at the time, at least to Mary, who trusted Bothwell. Moreover, I declared that Bothwell would prove to be a lifelong ally of Mary’s, and certainly there is one view of what happened that would allow one to see it that way. But what comes next, after Bothwell’s trial, casts his character in an entirely different light. On April 24th, not three months since the murder of her husband for which he had been credibly accused, the Earl of Bothwell kidnapped Mary, Queen of Scots. She was traveling with her retinue after visiting with the infant prince when Bothwell met her in the road with an army of 800 horsemen with swords drawn. He told her that there was danger of insurrection at the capital, and that she must come with him to Dunbar for her own protection. Now much is made of her compliance in this situation. Mary’s later accusers would insinuate that the entire abduction had been planned in advance with her own knowledge, but Mary insisted that she only went with Bothwell to save her small retinue from being slaughtered. Then, of course, there is the third option that she might have genuinely trusted this man who had saved her from rebellion before. Nevertheless, in this instance, Bothwell was lying, and back at Dunbar, he produced a bond, signed by numerous of her lords, among them Morton, Huntly, and her half-brother Moray, urging her to marry Bothwell. It appears that Bothwell may have coerced some of the signatories, but it also seems likely that the bond was signed with a view toward encouraging Bothwell to make a fatal mistake, which Bothwell did. Understanding what happened next depends largely on one’s opinion of Mary. Those who claimed that she and Bothwell had been lovers and were laying pretext for their marriage believed that Mary gave herself to Bothwell willingly, and called it a scandal that proved she was a wanton and a murderess. But those who took Mary for an honest woman believed her when she said she had been raped by Bothwell and held captive at Dunbar and not one of her lords raised an objection or a finger to aid her.

While the queen did agree to marry Bothwell, in her letters to the French court about her decision, she indicates that, while he had mistreated her at first, he thereafter treated her with gentleness and respect, and she believed he might be the only man with the strength to help her keep her kingdom from being taken by the Protestant lords who unceasingly schemed to take it from her. Another possibility that seems awful and absurd to modern sensibilities is that Mary felt she had to marry him because he had raped her, that indeed this was Bothwell’s purpose in assaulting her, to obligate her to marry him, for stupid as it may sound, in that era, the fact that a lady, especially a queen, might openly have sexual intercourse with a man without marrying him would irrevocably tarnish her character, even if that sexual encounter had been against her will. So she may have felt that Bothwell had given her no choice and played the part of a successfully wooed woman, making excuses to help save the reputation of the man who would be king. Or the letters may have been lies manufactured by a Bothwell who had utter control over her at Dunbar. Regardless, the lords who had signed Bothwell’s bond had no intention of placing him above themselves. They deftly turned the people against both Mary and Bothwell, painting them as libertines, he with a wife he only now divorced and who it was said he still lay with, and she with a husband only lately buried. More than that, they portrayed them as murderers, guilty of the worst kind of murder: regicide. On May 15th, Mary and Bothwell were married, and less than a month later, their enemies, who called themselves the Confederate Lords, assembled forces. They met Bothwell’s and the Queen’s forces at Carberry Hill, flying a flag that depicted Darnley’s murder. Bothwell declared that he would meet any of them in single combat, but when one by one, Confederate Lords came forth to challenge him, he kept refusing on the grounds the challengers were beneath his station, which indeed everyone was, now that he was king. Eventually, Bothwell just rode off, leaving Mary to surrender herself to her rebel lords. This would be the last Mary saw of her husband, who would end up sailing overseas to gather more forces, but he was taken captive in Norway, at the home town of his former wife, who promptly sued him for abandoning her without returning her dowry. Thereafter, he was given to the king of Denmark, where he rotted for ten years, chained to a pillar until his death.

The surrender of Mary at Carberry Hill. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Mary, on the other hand, was taken to Lochleven Castle and imprisoned while her half brother Moray moved to take her power and rule as regent in the name of his nephew James VI, the baby son that Mary would never see again. Within a fortnight of her capture, whisperings arose that a silver casket had been discovered with letters inside that proved everything the Confederate Lords alleged: Mary’s affair with Bothwell and her conspiring with him to murder Darnley so that they could marry each other. Just what did these letters prove, though? They were a series of letters and sonnets said to be a longstanding correspondence between herself and Bothwell, though they lacked any clear address proving to whom they’d been written. Moreover, the strange incoherence and changes in tone have suggested to many that different letters of Mary’s to different people had been spliced together to create a forgery. In fact the letter that was supposedly the most damning actually refers to the Earl of Bothwell in the third person, seeming to prove that the letter had not been written to him. Nevertheless, these letters seemed to be enough to compel Mary to abdicate the throne to Moray. Perhaps this was because their contents had been so widely advertised that the people had generally turned against their queen, believing her a harlot and a killer. Or perhaps it had something to do with the show trial that the Confederate Lords had held while they kept her in captivity awaiting a trial of her own. On the 27th of June, William Blackadder, Bothwell’s man who had been so unlucky as to have been first on the scene at Kirk o’Field after the explosion, probably because he had been out drinking nearby, was tried with a few other men and summarily executed in what is widely regarded by historians as a farce of a trial. Blackadder was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and the various parts of his body were nailed to the gates of every major city in Scotland. With the Confederate Lords thus so crudely displaying their power and ruthlessness, it is perhaps not surprising that Mary gave them what they wanted and then, as soon as she was able, escaped Lochleven by means of a disguise and a little help. After a short-lived effort at once again reclaiming her throne, Mary finally was forced to flee to England and seek the protection of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth.

Does the evidence support the idea that Mary was complicit in the murder of her husband? Well, certainly a circumstantial case could be made. We know he had caused her much trouble and that she wanted him out of the way, no longer a threat to her rule or the succession of her son. And it certainly doesn’t look good that she dragged him out of the relative safety of Glasgow back to Edinburgh where she knew his enemies plotted against him. It seems highly suspicious that when Mary was promising to resume marital relations with the likely syphilitic Darnley, he was murdered before she would have to lay with him and expose herself to the disease. And she certainly did show much favor to Bothwell after the murder, despite the fact that Bothwell was among the lords who had at least intimated at Craigmillar that murder could be an advantageous course of action. Bothwell’s later machinations and his presence at Craigmillar when a secret agreement to murder Darnley was rumored to have been signed by various lords does seem to implicate his involvement, and the fact that he continued to enjoy Mary’s favor after the crime would seem to reflect poorly on either her character or her judgment. But this proves nothing. Her attempt at reconciling with Darnley may have reflected the fact that she dared not go as far as murder, and her favor of Bothwell may only have meant that she put great stock in him based on his years of loyalty to herself and her mother before her. She may not have had an inkling of Bothwell’s true character until the very day he abducted her. As for the allegations that they had long been secret lovers, this comes from the Casket Letters, which have been discredited as likely forgeries. The only other evidence was from the historian George Buchanan, formerly Mary’s tutor but lately elevated in position by the new regent, Moray. After Mary had fled to England, Moray took the Casket Letters there to convince Queen Elizabeth to try his half sister for the crime of regicide, and he also took Buchanan, who had written a document called Detectio Mariæ Reginæ, or “The Exposure of Queen Mary,” which painted Mary as an amoral and reckless libertine who had been carrying on with Bothwell since her return to Scotland and had colluded with him to do away with her pesky husband. This evidence too, though, is unreliable, as it appears to be completely unsubstantiated libel composed to suit the purposes of Moray, Buchanan’s patron. In my principal source, Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley, Alison Weir does a thorough job of pointing out nearly every falsehood that Buchanan invented, observing that much of what he alleged was never recorded as being observed in contemporary writings. For example, during a time when Buchanan says everyone was well aware that Mary and Bothwell were fornicating, contemporary records mention no such rumors or accusations, instead recording the suspicions that Mary was sleeping with poor David Rizzio. Thus it is clear that Buchanan’s purpose was only to defame, and in the end, there is no evidence against Mary, Queen of Scots.

A drawing of the later trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The same might be said, though, for all the other prime suspects in the murder. Many were the accusations and testimonies sworn out that implicated this lord or the other, but little in the way of incontrovertible evidence was ever produced. Certainly Bothwell was not the only lord at Craigmillar throwing out options for ridding themselves of Darnley, nor was it said that his was the only name on the legendary bond to kill the king. First there was Morton, who had previously entered into a bond with Darnley before Rizzio’s murder and felt the king had betrayed him and his fellow conspirators. Among the many men suspected of being at Kirk o’Field that night was Morton’s kinsman, Archibald Douglas. It was said that the assassins wore silk over their armor and slippers over their boots to muffle the sounds of their movements that night, and that the slipper found near the king’s body actually belonged to Douglas, which implicates Morton. Then there was Maitland, who had previously enticed Darnley to enter a conspiracy to murder Rizzio with the intention of afterward implicating him and in this case may have enticed Bothwell to enter a conspiracy to murder Darnley with the same plan of afterward betraying him and making him the patsy, something he may have been doing later as well, when he signed Bothwell’s bond about marrying Mary. And lastly, there was Moray, the ever-scheming half-brother who had always wanted Darnley gone and never before shrank from treason to get what he wanted. The fact that afterward he doggedly pursued the escaped Mary into England with likely forged documents and false testimony hoping to see her executed so she could never take her crown back from him certainly paints him as a likely candidate for the prime mover in the plot. So who was it? Who dispatched assassins to blow up the king’s lodging at Kirk o’Field? Was it just two of these men? Three? Was Mary in on it? We simply don’t know.

There was one other possibility, that Queen Elizabeth, who had long viewed Mary as a threat and resented her insistence on being named the successor to the throne of England, had sent the assassins herself. If that were the case though, she must have relented when Mary came to her for protection. No longer was her cousin in power, but rather she was in Elizabeth’s power. Thus when Moray came with his supposed evidence, Elizabeth refused to find Mary guilty or innocent, preferring to leave matters as they stood. Eventually, though, when Pope Pius V issued a bull encouraging English Catholics to overthrow her, Elizabeth placed Mary in prison, and after dealing with a succession Catholic assassination plots that aimed to supplant her with Mary, she took the queen off the board, so to speak, and had Mary beheaded. Moray, the treacherous half-brother, did had not lived to see her end, though. He had been killed just a few short years after his regency began, shot by a supporter of Mary’s who was perched in a window of a house that Moray was riding past in a procession. He was the first head of state to be assassinated by a firearm. His nephew, Mary’s son, James, would later become the first king of a unified Scotland, England and Ireland, finally fulfilling his mother’s ambitions. As for his father, when the so-called Marian civil war had first flared in Scotland, a mob opened Lord Darnley’s tomb at Holyrood Abbey, and someone stole his skull. Through the years, different skulls have turned up, one at Edinburgh University and another by the Royal College of Surgeons in London, each claiming theirs is the true skull of Lord Darnley. In modern times, using 3D modeling and comparing the images with portraits, experts have ruled one of these skulls out… but that doesn’t mean the other is genuine. As far as we know, the skull of Lord Darnley could be forever lost amid the rubble of history.

A eyewitness sketch of Mary’s execution. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Further Reading

Weir, Alison. Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley. Ballantine, 2003.

The Murder of Lord Darnley, Part One: The Vipers' Nest (A Royal Blood Mystery)

Before the rise of a new moon, it was a very dark and cold night in Scotland on the 9th of February, 1567, with a frost encrusting the king’s lodgings at Kirk o’Field. This medieval church stood on a hill less than a mile from the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, the seat of power in Scotland, where Mary, Queen of Scots and wife of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, wielded her royal authority. Lord Darnley, the 22-year-old king whom Mary had wed less than two years earlier and as a last resort, had never been given the royal power that he’d hoped would be his, the Crown Matrimonial, and as such had been estranged from the Queen of Scots for some time. However, recently, after being installed at Kirk o’Field while he recovered from a grave illness, it had appeared that Mary was of a mind to reconcile with him. She tended to him and slept in those lodging with him frequently while he recuperated. On the evening of the 9th, it was her intention to stay there as well, but she came out to Kirk o’Field early that evening to show the more and more recovered king her gown and mask, for she was to attend a masquerade that night back at the palace before returning to him. However, after spending longer than expected at Kirk o’Field, she decided that she would have to retire back at the palace after the masquerade, for she anticipated it would be too late to return. So Mary, Queen of Scots, the most beautiful young queen in all of Europe, left her husband, Lord Darnley, promising to see him the next day. Late that night, at 2am on Monday the 10th, a great blast shattered the night’s calm, waking up everyone near Kirk o’Field and even disturbing the sleep of the Queen three quarters of a mile away at Holyrood Palace. With the explosion still echoing in their ears, night watchmen arrived with lanterns at the source of the noise: the King’s lodgings at Kirk o’Field. They heard a man crying out for help, and found a blackened figure, one of Lord Darnley’s servants, clinging to the top of a wall. The lodgings themselves had been reduced to rubble. Throughout the night, the watchmen dug frantically through the debris as snow fell all around them. Beneath the rubble, they eventually uncovered two mangled corpses, but failed to find the king. Not until 3 hours later did they search the orchard beyond the wall, where they found the dead bodies of both Lord Darnley and his valet, William Taylor. It was assumed that the king and his valet had been killed by the explosion as well, thrown from the lodgings into the orchard by the force of the blast. However, as the sun rose and made a closer examination of the scene possible, some details were observed that have turned the murder of Lord Darnley into an enduring mystery… not just a whodunnit but a howdunnit. For they found the corpses of the King and his valet had not a mark on them. Nearly naked in their nightshirts, there appeared no scorch marks, no bruises, no wounds or signs of strangulation. They looked as if they’d been laid out in the orchard, and around them were several undamaged items from the lodgings: a quilt, a chair, a piece of rope, and a dagger.

To tell of Lord Darnley’s murder, we must focus on Mary, Queen of Scots, for really, sadly, the story of his demise in large part is her story. She came to inherit the throne from her father, King James V of Scotland, whose two sons with Marie de Guise had died in infancy. It was said that upon hearing the news that he had fathered a daughter, the ailing king said, “It came from a woman, and it will end in a woman.” He was referring to the fact that the Stewart dynasty had been established through the daughter of the great Scottish leader Robert the Bruce. You may remember my mention of the endless wars between England and Scotland in my episodes on Edward II, whom Robert the Bruce defeated at the Battle of Bannockburn, thereby settling his undisputed rule over Scotland. His daughter, Marjorie, bore the first male heir of their house, Robert II, the first Stewart king. Centuries later, as he died without a male heir, James V was leaving the fate of the Stewart dynasty with his own daughter. At six days old, she took the throne, and she represented a hope not only for the future of Scotland but for a united England and Scotland, for James V was the son of Margaret Tudor, the daughter of King Henry VII of England, giving Mary a strong claim to the English throne as well. This may have been on the mind of King Henry VIII in 1544 when he sought by treaty to marry his son to the infant Queen Mary. However, the Protestant Reformation made things far more complicated. Mary’s mother, Marie de Guise, remained a loyal Catholic and refused to let her daughter marry the Protestant King Henry’s son, choosing instead to revive an ancient alliance with Catholic France, the perennial enemy of England. This perceived betrayal ignited the so-called War of the Rough Wooing, in which King Henry VIII’s forces laid waste to many Scottish villages and towns. During this war, there was one Scottish lord, Matthew Stuart, the 4th Earl of Lennox, who took up arms for the English. Invading his native Scotland, he took numerous child hostages, thereby forcing their fathers to serve under him. When these men escaped, he murdered their children, an act that would earn him the undying hatred of the Scottish. But eventually, through some unforeseen circumstances, this Earl of Lennox would find himself very close to the Scottish throne, for his son, Henry, Lord Darnley, would one day be betrothed to Mary, Queen of Scots.

Mary, Queen of Scots, depicted as a child. Public Domain artwork accessed from Art Institute Chicago.

As her mother, Marie de Guise, struggled with the Scottish lords who more and more pushed to make Scotland a Protestant country, and as James Hamilton, Earl of Arran and Governor of the Realm while Mary was in her minority, fought to expel the occupying English forces, one solution to their problems presented itself: they would marry the young queen to the Dauphin of France, putting Mary in line to rule as Queen of Catholic France as well as Scotland, and securing some immediate military aid from France to push back the English invaders. So in 1548, at five years old, Mary sailed to France, where she spent much of her youth in the royal court, surrounded by Rennaissance culture and art and exposed to the lax morals and promiscuous behavior of the French royals. There she grew into a most beautiful woman, red of hair and a statuesque six feet tall. Her French admirers called her la plus parfait, which translates as “the most perfect.” Her closest friend was Francis, the sickly Dauphin to whom she was promised. She spent her time reading and dancing and riding horse and playing all kinds of games. Her education was extensive, but does not seem to have extended to statecraft, as it was always assumed that others would govern Scotland on her behalf. Back in Scotland, by 1551, the English had finally been driven out, and Mary’s mother, the Queen Dowager Marie de Guise, finally took control as the Regent of Scotland and took steps to push back against the rising influence of Protestantism. What she managed to do was stir up a nest of vipers in Scotland, as Protestant noblemen formed a league against her, calling themselves the Lords of the Congregation of Jesus Christ. In 1558, Mary and Francis were married at Notre-Dame in Paris, and some months later, the Catholic queen of England, who had been dubbed Bloody Mary because of her violent efforts at counter-reformation, died. To all of Catholic Europe, Mary, Queen of Scots, was believed to be her rightful heir, but instead, the crown passed to King Henry VIII’s daughter by his second wife, Elizabeth I. Viewing Elizabeth as a usurper, King Henry II of France, Mary’s new father-in-law, publicly declared that she and Francis were the true king and queen of England.

Not surprisingly, then, Queen Elizabeth supported the Protestant Lords of the Congregation in their efforts to resist the Catholic Regent Marie de Guise in Scotland. After signing a treaty with these rebel lords, Elizabeth sent troops in 1560 to drive out the French and overthrow Marie de Guise, who died later that year from dropsy. In the absence of both the queen and the regent, the country was governed by a council of Protestant Lords who illegally passed legislation to criminalize Catholicism without the queen’s approval. At the end of that year, still mourning the death of her mother and lamenting the betrayal of the Scottish lords, Mary also lost her husband, King Francis II, to a brain abscess. After considering her options, which were either to find another foreign marriage prospect or to return to Scotland and wrest back control of her realm, she bravely chose to go home, where all of her mother’s enemies awaited her return. Among the most powerful of the Protestant Lords arrayed against her were Sir William Maitland; James Douglas, the Earl of Morton; George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly; Patrick, the Earl of Ruthven; and her own bastard half-brother, Sir James Stewart, later the Earl of Moray. Another Protestant lord was James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, who had never allied with the Lords of the Congregation against Mary’s mother and who would prove to be a lifelong ally of the Queen of Scots. The Lords of the Congregation feared that Mary’s return would signal a counter-reformation, and her half-brother Sir James travelled to France to negotiate her return to power, eager that she promise not to interfere with the newly established Protestant Church. Once they reached an agreement and the way was smoothed for the transfer of power, she sailed back home, arriving in August of 1561 to find her homeland far poorer and less populated than France. Nevertheless, she was well-received by the public, and her accommodations at Holyrood Palace were well befitting a queen. As she took the reins of government, she relied on the advice of the loyal Earl of Bothwell as well as that of William Maitland, whom she made her Secretary of State despite his involvement in the betrayal of her mother. Other members of the Lords of the Congregation also remained on her Privy Council. So utterly surrounded by Protestant lords was she that she found herself having to placate them that she did not mean to take steps to revive Catholicism in Scotland, while also leading on the Pope in Rome that she certainly would re-establish Catholicism as the faith of the land just as soon as was feasible.

A Protestant sermon attended by the Lords of the Congregation. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Mary’s return meant the rise of some and the downfall of others. Her half-brother Sir James used his influence over the queen to take the title the Earl of Moray and to take lands for himself from other lords through accusations of treason and military adventure. Chief among Moray’s enemies at court was Bothwell, who was in high favor with his sister. In order to discredit him, Moray instigated groundless rumors that Bothwell intended to abduct Mary in order to keep her as a sex slave, and to murder any other lords who got between him and power. Mary doesn’t appear to have believed the accusations, but in order to make peace, she had Bothwell imprisoned. Bothwell managed to escape his imprisonment by prying a bar loose from his cell window and climbing down the side of the castle in Edinburgh where he was being held, and he fled to Northumberland and afterward would take refuge in France, establishing a correspondence with Mary to assure her that he had never planned any treason. While Bothwell remained loyal to his queen and served her as best he could while in exile, Mary was now without her staunchest ally in the viper’s nest of her court. Eventually, though, she found another whom she trusted, not a lord but rather a lowly musician. David Rizzio, an Italian singer and lute player, had become a favorite of the queen and eventually served as her personal secretary, though he was not skilled at letters. In fact, so close did the two become that members of Mary’s Privy Council feared his influence over her and suggested he was a spy sent by the pope. More than this, some insinuated that the queen was sexually involved with the musician, even though he was often described as ugly or even deformed. The truth of this, whether Mary was sexually involved with Rizzio or simply found him loyal and witty and enjoyed his company, is unknown. Perhaps she was flirtatious with Rizzio, displaying some coquetry that she picked up among the French which her Scottish countrymen misconstrued. But it can’t be denied that she was intimate with him in the sense that they spent most of their time together, and he would keep her company in her chambers even late at night. Whatever unseemliness there might have been in Mary’s relationship with Rizzio and whatever agendas the musician might have harbored, what the Protestant lords could never forgive him was his vocal support of Mary’s marriage to another Catholic.

The second marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, was a matter of great interest not only to those in her court, but also to Queen Elizabeth. Mary, Queen of Scots, was intent on pressing her claim to the English throne. She did not seek to overthrow Elizabeth, but rather, since Elizabeth had not herself married, she pushed to be named Elizabeth’s rightful heir. However, the people of England largely saw in her the possibility of another Bloody Mary, someone who would try to reverse their Protestant Reformation, and therefore balked at the prospect that she should take the English throne. Seeing Mary as a potential threat, especially if she were to marry a powerful foreign Catholic figure and thereby give papistry a toehold in Scotland, Elizabeth sought to hold the succession rights over Mary’s head to ensure she would not seek a match with, for example, Don Carlos, the heir to Philip II of Spain. Making her declaration of Mary as her heir dependent on her approval of a match for Mary, Elizabeth suggested that she consider certain Protestant kings in Scandinavia. When Mary refused and persisted in seeking an alliance with Spain, Elizabeth went so far as to offer Mary her own lover, Lord Robert Dudley as a match. Elizabeth may have seen this as a great concession as well as a shrewd maneuver, since she was assured of Dudley’s loyalty, but as Dudley was of such a lower station than her and was surrounded by numerous scandals, Mary could not help but see this as an insult. When Mary’s hopes of marrying Don Carlos fell through, though, Elizabeth insisted that marrying Dudley was her only choice if she wished to be declared the heir to the English throne. Yet there was one other candidate who was both a loyal subject of Elizabeth and yet was a Catholic of Scottish blood: Lord Darnley, son of the Earl of Lennox, who since the War of the Rough Wooing and his massacre of Scottish children had remained in England. Back when Mary’s husband had died in France, Lennox was already seeing an opportunity to marry his son to the Queen of Scots and thereby re-establish his family in Scotland in a position of power. He even took Darnley to France to press his suit while Mary was still grieving the deaths of her husband and mother. Aware of Lennox’s atrocities and disliking their grasping at power, Mary had vowed never to marry the boy, but years later, in Scotland, the match began to seem like her only option. After all, Darnley had something of a claim to the English throne himself, and he was Catholic, which meant Mary could still keep up at least the pretense that she eventually intended to bring the Catholic Church back into power in Scotland. With Elizabeth’s permission, he came to Mary’s court and did much to impress her. He was beardless, but handsome and tall enough to cut a striking figure standing beside Mary. He charmed both Mary and her close advisor, Rizzio, with his lute playing and his dancing, and the three of them enjoyed playing dice and cards. While the Protestant lords at court mistrusted him, Bothwell, still in exile, seemed to approve of the match. So on July 29th 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married Lord Darnley, kicking of several days of ostentatious banquets, balls, and masquerades.

A portrait of the youthful Lord Darnely. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Yet there was still much disapproval of Darnley as a match for Mary. Even Queen Elizabeth, who had seemed to be agreeing to the match when she granted Darnley permission to travel to Scotland, afterward acted as though Mary had chosen him to spite her. In truth, it seems Elizabeth got everything she might have wanted. Mary would not make an alliance with a hostile foreign power and would instead ally herself with a fallen family in a marriage that provided little benefits to her, and Elizabeth could act as if she’d been defied and could continue to deny Mary the right of succession. At court in Scotland, the most powerful of the Protestant lords, who of course believed that Mary’s new marriage to another Catholic meant an impending counter-Reformation, had made their opposition to Darnley clear. When Mary proceeded regardless and had Darnley proclaimed King of Scotland, several of these lords, led by her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, went into open rebellion, leaving the royal court and amassing armies. Thus, as had happened with Edward II and many another monarch before her, Mary found herself facing a civil war with rebel earls who disliked her choice of advisors and relationships. Since Moray, who had been the principal enemy and accuser of Bothwell, stood now in defiance of her authority, she made immediate arrangements for the Earl of Bothwell to return from his exile, and less than a month after her nuptials, she rode out of Edinburgh at the head of an army, with a pistol on her hip and a helmet on her head, bent on bringing the rebels to heel. Eight days later, while Mary’s forces were in the east, near Glasgow, Moray attempted to occupy Edinburgh but was driven out after a day. Over the next month or so, as Mary led her forces all over Scotland trying to stamp out this rebellion, which would come to be called the Chaseabout Raid, the Earl of Moray, seeing the writing on the wall, wrote to Queen Elizabeth pleading for military intervention. Elizabeth, though, fearing that once again the French might land troops to prevent their invasion of Scotland, would only send warships up the coast to try to prevent Bothwell from returning and strengthening Mary. When this blockade failed and Bothwell returned to join his might with Mary’s, the only further help Elizabeth would offer Moray was protection. So Moray and Bothwell traded places; as Bothwell took up a place of honor in Mary’s court and council, Mary’s troublesome half-brother went into exile in England.

As Mary worked to resolve the threat of her rebel lords, another threat festered. Almost immediately after their marriage, Darnley began to show Mary his true colors. He insisted that she not waste time in proclaiming him king, and he began to resent her when she evaded his demands to be given the Crown Matrimonial, which would have given him the actual power of a king. It is unclear if Mary ever intended to confer royal authority to Darnley, but certainly when he began to reveal himself to be a spoiled, arrogant, jealous, and spiteful boy, she must have realized how dangerous it would be to empower him. He made few allies among the nobility at court, who all thought him reckless and haughty, scornful and paranoid. At first, besides Mary, it seemed only Rizzio was a friend and ally to Darnley, which made sense as the lords were equally resentful of the favor that Rizzio enjoyed. Indeed, just as the lords had whispered about Mary’s improper relations with Rizzio, some spread the rumor that Darnley as well had taken the Italian as a lover, and that three of them slept together. Soon though, Darnley turned against the only allies he had when he began to amplify the rumors about Rizzio and the queen, intimating that he suspected Mary and her secretary of cuckolding him. In truth, this would seem to disprove the rumors that he was sleeping with the both of them, since obviously then he would have more than suspicions about her sexual adventures. More likely, he was looking to remove Rizzio as an influence on the queen so that he could supplant him has her chief advisor and finally convince her to give him the Crown Matrimonial. Three months into their marriage, when Mary announced her pregnancy, far from being overjoyed, Darnley seemed to take it as a blow, realizing that an heir would mean even less chance that he would reign as a monarch in Scotland. During the first few months of her pregnancy, he made a spectacle of himself as a drunk and carried on affairs with other women. Then, ironically, he also made grand public displays of his devotion to the Catholic faith, perhaps in hopes that foreign Catholic powers would intervene and help him take the Crown Matrimonial hoping that he would move faster than Mary had to start a counter-Reformation. With Darnley so clearly estranged from the queen, some Protestant lords, including Ruthven and Morton, began to hatch a plot against Mary’s Italian secretary, David Rizzio, believing that without him whispering in Mary’s ear, she might be more amenable to forgiving her half-brother Moray and allowing his return. They spread the rumor that Mary was not pregnant with Darnley’s child but with Rizzio’s, and thus they drew the resentful young king into their scheme.

A portrait of David Rizzio. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

On March 1st, 1566, the conspirators against Rizzio asked Darnley to sign a bond taking full responsibility for the plot against Rizzio. It may be that they had more planned than killing Rizzio, for if they were to assassinate Mary in the process, this document would incriminate Darnley, thereby ridding them of the king as well, whom in truth they detested. The same day, perhaps also at the insistence of these lords, Darnley wrote to the Earl of Moray, telling him as his king to await a summons, and a week later, he wrote again to promise Moray a safe return to Scotland. Thus it seems likely that Ruthven and Morton and maybe also Moray and the other conspirators were planning something of a coup. The next evening after writing this summons to Moray, Darnley let a group of assassins into Holyrood Palace and led them up a secret staircase from his chambers right into the queen’s bedchambers. Darnley appeared first from behind a tapestry and played nonchalant, sitting down with Mary. Then Lord Ruthven appeared, clad in armor, and demanded that David Rizzio come with him. Mary asked why, and Ruthven answered that he had caused her to banish nobility so that he might himself be ennobled, and that he had kept her from fulfilling her promises to the king. Mary turned to Darnley and asked if he knew about this, but Darnley feigned ignorance. Mary demanded that Ruthven leave or be arrested for treason, but Ruthven drew a pistol and a dagger and advanced on Rizzio, who cowered behind his queens skirts. A group of five other conspirators then entered the room, and a struggle ensued as they attempted to take hold of Rizzio. Ruthven threw the queen into Darnley’s arms, and the king held her firmly even as one of the conspirators seemed to purposely shove a chair into her stomach, perhaps trying to cause a miscarriage. Even more horrible is the account that, after the assassins had first stabbed Rizzio, seizing Darnley’s own dagger and thrusting very near to the queen herself, another conspirator aimed a pistol at Mary’s womb and pulled the trigger. It was said she was only saved because the pistol failed to fire. Dragging Rizzio down the secret stairs, the assassins stabbed him some 57 times, attacking so savagely that one of the assassins was accidentally stabbed in the process. The fact that they left Darnley’s dagger in the corpse seems to support the idea that they hoped the king would take the full blame for Rizzio’s death.

In the aftermath of this attack, the conspirators kept the queen captive in her rooms as they decided what to do with her. Slowly, as his own men were removed and the conspirator lords put their own guards around him, Darnley began to realize that he had been used and was a prisoner himself. He went up the secret stairs from his chamber to Mary’s and pleaded with her to let him in so that he could speak with her, and eventually she did, listening to his explanations that he had been manipulated and at least pretending to be sympathetic to his pleas to forgive him. Together, they began to hatch their own plans. She pretended to be ill and had her midwife sent to attend to her, and with her help, they managed to send a secret letter out to Bothwell to gather other lords loyal to her and await her imminent escape. While she refused to speak with her captors, Morton and Ruthven, she agreed to see Moray, who had recently returned to Scotland and been in hiding. In a tearful reunion, in which she appealed to him as her brother and he assured her he had had no part in the conspiracy to murder Rizzio, they were reconciled, and she turned Moray against the conspirators. Then, by promising a pardon to the rebel lords, she convinced them to remove their armed guards from the palace, and she and Darnley, by the dark of night, escaped by creeping down some service stairs, through the servants’ quarters, and out a wine cellar. Along the way, Mary tripped on a mound of dirt that turned out to be David Rizzio’s shallow grave. She and Darnley took horses and rode east out of Edinbugh. About ten miles on, they saw some men on horseback in the road, and Darnley panicked, begging the queen to ride fast lest they be killed by their enemies and even whipping her horse. When she begged him to consider her pregnant condition, he declared that they could always have another baby if this one died, to which she furiously suggested that he go on without her and worry for himself. To Darnley’s great dishonor, he did abandon her, riding off before realizing that the horsemen in the road were Bothwell and other loyal lords there to rescue them.

A depiction of the murder of Rizzio. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Not surprisingly, Mary did not so easily forgive and forget Darnley’s betrayal, and as she went about putting her country’s affairs in order, forgiving some lords, such as Moray and Maitland, while executing some lowly assassins and declaring certain rebel lords, such as Morton and Ruthven, outlaws and driving them into exile, Darnley grew once again resentful and insolent. The queen’s supporters, unsurprisingly, rejected Darnley for his part in the recent attempted coup, and as he had publicly declared his own innocence in the affair, the lords in exile also considered him an enemy. Yet as the father of her child, for whom she desired an uncontested claim to the throne of Scotland, Mary felt she could not openly turn against him and in fact needed to protect him from himself. At one point, Mary had to take his pistols out of his bedchamber as she was afraid he would attempt suicide with them. When in June of 1566 she bore Darnley a son, James, the future king of Scotland England and Ireland, this did little to reconcile them. While they had been restored to the palace at Edinburgh, Darnley, resenting his diminished status, moved away to Glasgow and began threatening to leave the country and convince certain Catholic foreign powers that he had been wronged by Mary—a ridiculous notion, but with the rumors about the child’s paternity persisting, and other, even more absurd conspiracy theories cropping up, like that their child had been stillborn but replaced by a changeling just to prevent his taking the Crown Matrimonial, there was no telling whether some who were unhappy with Mary’s lack of progress initiating a counter-Reformation might have used these claims as an excuse to back Darnley in a coup. Other rumors suggested that Darnley planned to abduct their son, and when Mary became deathly ill, vomiting blood a few months after giving birth, it was suspected that Darnley had attempted to kill her by having her poisoned. While convalescing at Craigmillar, Mary appears to have consulted with her council about what should be done in regards to her troublesome husband, and they extracted from Mary the promise of a pardon for certain exiled lords, such as Morton and Ruthven, if they could devise some way to rid her of Darnley.

In retrospect, it of course appears that Mary was conspiring with her lords at Craigmillar to assassinate the king, and that is certainly how it was presented later, when Mary’s enemies moved to hold her guilty of the murder. However, in looking closer at the evidence, it can be seen that Mary may just have been looking for some lawful means of extricating herself from the marriage, some grounds for divorcement. She expressed concern that nothing be done that might affect the legitimacy and succession rights of their son. This ruled out an annulment of their marriage. A Protestant divorce was not likely to be recognized by Darnley or his foreign Catholic supporters. Arresting Darnley for treason because of his part in the Rizzio incident might have done the trick, but by a technicality of Scottish law, a king could not be guilty of treason. Perhaps realizing that the only other option was murder, Mary is recorded as saying,  “I will that you do nothing, by which any spot may be laid on my honour and conscience; and therefore, I pray ye rather let the matter be in the estate as it is, abiding till God of his goodness put a remedy to it. That you believe would do me service, may possibly turn to my hurt and displeasure.” Thus, by this prescient statement, Mary seems to exonerate herself for what came later. But it is possible that she changed her mind when, shortly thereafter, Darnley insulted her by refusing to attend their son’s christening. According to later claims, a bond was signed at Craigmillar by numerous lords to undertake the assassination of Lord Darnley, but this document has never been found. Therefore, the great mystery of Darnley’s murder, besides how he ended up in the orchard without a mark on him after so great an explosion, is which Scottish lords undertook to kill him and why, and whether Mary, Queen of Scots, had any hand in it, as would later be alleged and contribute to her own death.

Further Reading

Weir, Alison. Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley. Ballantine, 2003.

The Jansenist Miracles of Enlightenment France, Part Two: The Convulsionnaires

In July of 1731, as the controversy over the growing cult at Saint-Médard grew, a woman named Aimée Pivert came to François de Pâris’s tomb seeking a cure for some neurological disorder. This illness may have been epilepsy, for upon touching the tomb, she was sent into spasmic contortions, causing some to think her possessed. Almost every day for a month, she experienced these convulsions at Saint-Médard, until finally she went away claiming she’d been cured. Two weeks later, some other women appeared to convulse at the tomb and then claimed to have been healed, one of them asserting that she had regained the powers of speech and hearing after the experience. At the end of August, an anticonstitutionnaire abbot by the name of Bescherand, whose leg had been withered since he was a boy, went to the cemetery to pray for a cure in hopes of further bolstering the Jansenist cause. This abbot also began screaming and experiencing dramatic contortions and convulsions every day when he visited, with some reports claiming that his writhing body lifted into the air in a way they could not explain. He would shout that different parts of his body were in pain, and the cult’s adherents would rub dirt from de Pâris’s grave onto those places, which somehow relieved his suffering. This went on for weeks, with the police that were present to keep the peace describing his displays as scandalous and terrifying in their reports. Jansenist doctors, who had been present for some time to record any miracles at the cemetery, examined him regularly and claimed his atrophied leg was much improved, while critics of the cult pointed out that he still couldn’t walk on it, suggesting he was faking the entire thing. Soon, though, these convulsions began to spread, as though contagious, whether through the power of suggestion or for reasons we have previously seen suggested to explain the Dancing Plague, like the consumption of tainted bread, or as suggested at the time, because of “hysteria” or even “erotic vapors.” As the ecclesiastical and political controversy continued to swirl around the cult, the occurrences at François de Pâris’s tomb began to change, and certainly in a metaphorical sense, these convulsions truly were contagious, for from them originated great tremors that would shake up not only the cult members and their Jansenist supporters, but the Gallican church, the sovereign court, and the entire ancien régime of pre-Revolutionary France.

The doctrinal controversy associated with the cult at Saint-Médard—that of Jansenist resistance to the papal bull Unigenitus—had already caused a further schism, this one not in the church, but in the government, between the Parliament, or sovereign court, of Paris and the royal authority of King Louis XV. Within the Parliament were certain factions who were strongly allied with or sympathetic toward the Jansenists, and these magistrates and barristers pushed against royal authority in such matters as the Formulary controversy, when Jansenists were compelled to sign a formula of submission, as well as in the king’s subsequent efforts to make the Unigenitus bull a state law rather than just a church doctrine. But among the Jansenist-friendly members of the sovereign court, there were also those directly supportive of the cult of François de Pâris at Saint-Médard. One was François de Pâris’s own brother, who unlike François had followed his family’s path into the law but had come to hold his late brother in great esteem. Another was a magistrate named Montgeron, who had visited François de Pâris’s tomb at Saint-Médard and become a believer after lapsing into a lengthy trance there.  These figures helped to rally the Parliament of Paris not only to the cause of the Jansenists, but to the aid of the cult at Saint-Médard as well, which they did by asserting the court’s right to hear appeals on disputed ecclesiastical cases, such as the suspension of Jansenist priests and the findings of investigations into miracles, should an appeal be made. Thus when the Archbishop of Paris, Vintimille, issued a decree forbidding the observances at Saint-Médard and Cardinal Fleury arranged for police to be stationed around the cemetery, the sovereign court took up the cause of the cult in earnest. Their power was a check to episcopal power, they argued, and therefore a bulwark to protect royal authority from the growing power of the Gallican Church. The king, however, whose chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, oversaw ecclesiastical matters, saw it more as a challenge to his own power. Add to this further pressure from Rome, where Pope Clement XII had expressed dissatisfaction with the king’s inability to crush this schismatic cult, ordered a certain biography of François de Pâris to be burned in the streets, and declared all the miracles attributed to him false. King Louis XV chose to bend to pressure from the church rather than pressure from the court, and he wielded his royal prerogative to annul certain of Parliament’s decisions on these matters. In protest, the Parliament of Paris went on strike, disrupting the administration of justice in the city for three months, and turning the so-called “affair of the Bull” which had become tied to the “affair of the miracles” into the “affair of the Parlement.”  

A depiction of the Grand Chamber of the Parlement of Paris in the early 18th century, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, the miracles at Saint-Médard had begun to be overshadowed by the strange convulsionism occurring at the cemetery, and Cardinal Fleury, perhaps thinking it best to act while the sovereign court was on strike, ordered the lieutenant of police in Paris, one Monsieur Hérault, to investigate. Hérault had already undertaken an investigation of the miraculous cures for Fleury, finding most of them to have been only a temporary remission of symptoms followed by a relapse, and declaring others to be outright Jansenist frauds. Embarking on a similar mission to debunk this new development in the miracles, he started by arresting several of the growing group of people who were experiencing convulsions at Saint-Médard, those who had come to be called convulsionnaires, and locking them up at the Bastille. There, Hérault interrogated them in long, grueling sessions and had them examined by respected physicians over the course of two weeks. Among those examined were one Pierre-Martin Gontier, who under duress confessed that he consciously made himself have these convulsions and demonstrated them on command, making his limbs stiff and then shaking them and contorting himself into a variety of postures. Gontier, upon his release, recanted this confession, but others Hérault likewise grilled intensely and had examined by doctors made similar admissions. They always denied any fraudulent intent, though, claiming instead a desire to fit in among the others experiencing such convulsions. Then again, some refused, even after numerous interrogations, to admit that their convulsions were anything but genuine and divinely inspired. These he left out of his report. Armed with the results of his investigation, Cardinal Fleury succeeded in getting the king to declare the convulsions a threat to public order and issue an ordinance shutting down the cemetery at Saint-Médard once and for all. Early one morning in January 1732, armed guards marched through the streets of the Paris suburb of Saint-Marcaeu, stationing copies of the ordinance high enough that it would be difficult to tear them down, posting guards on horseback at the church and cemetery, and locking the gates of Saint-Médard. Thereafter, Hérault’s police force arrested any convulsionnaires who publicly displayed their spasms and contortions.

By this time, the Parliament had come to an understanding with the king and convened once again, but they were not about to stand by and watch what they viewed as a gross abuse of ecclesiastical authority. Especially outraged at the closing of the cemetery was Jérome-Nicolas Pâris, François de Pâris’s brother, who called the Archbishop’s denunciations of his brother’s biography calumny, and who insisted that the police and the church officials either had already or soon would desecrate his brother’s grave by exhuming him. Eventually, though, when these rumors were proven untrue by an inspection of the tomb, the Parliament’s opposition to the closing of the cemetery faded, as it seemed there was little they could do about it. However, if the goal of the Cardinal and Archbishop had been to crush the cult of François de Pâris and the convulsionnaires entirely, they soon realized that they had failed to accomplish it. Unable to perform their observances and experience their convulsions in the cemetery or in public, the cult of François de Pâris moved underground, meeting in whatever chapels would host them or in private residences. To avoid arrest, they were forced to become something of a secret society, addressing each other using codenames, and gaining entrance to their secret sessions with passwords. At these sessions, which often lacked any kind of clergy to lead them, a spirit of egalitarianism developed, with lay people delivering extemporaneous sermons to the rich and the poor alike, among men and women, none of whom held any position of power over any other. As before, they carried relics of François de Pâris, and dirt from his grave at Saint-Médard, in an effort to bring the presence of their unofficial saint into their sessions, and also before, through appeals for his intercession, miraculous cures were reported, often accompanied by convulsions. Indeed, it was only the ability to experience convulsions that seems to have afforded any status among the group. This convulsionism became more and more the focal point of these sessions, developing stranger, even supernatural qualities that drew even disbelievers to seek out these secret sessions as entertainment and to judge for themselves whether to believe the strange, seemingly paranormal events occurring there. In this way, the convulsionnaires were forerunners of the spiritualists of the 19th century. In fact, the French word used for a convulsionnaire session, was séance.

Depiction of convulsionnaires in the Bastille, via Wikimedia Commons

As the séances of the convulsionnaires gradually changed in character, the convulsions became more important in themselves, not as a medium through which miracles were performed, but as a kind of divine communication to the sect. More and more, those experiencing the convulsions appeared to or claimed to experience great pain from them, and then to indicate through gestures that they required some physical relief from others present in the form of some kind of bodily contact. This could be seen as an evolution from the earliest convulsions of Bescherand who asked that dirt from François de Pâris’s grave be rubbed on parts of his body, but among the convulsionnaires, this was taken to extremes. It was declared that they required injury to be done to them in order to achieve this secour, or relief. So convulsionnaires, many of them young women contorting themselves into indiscreet and even lewd positions, would be struck violently upon their bodies and appeared to gain physical pleasure from it. These blows eventually became known as petits secours, or small relief, for soon they graduated to grands secours, or even secours meurtriers, murderous relief. These convulsing women would be mercilessly beaten with blunt weapons, trampled upon, stuck with pins, and even stabbed with knives and swords! At the utmost extreme, it became rather common for convulsionnaires to be actually crucified before astonished audiences at their séances. And what is more astonishing, it was said that, not only did they derive relief or even ecstasy from these acts of violence, but they were said to have come through them unscathed, unbloodied and without a bruise or any other mark. It was said that, while convulsing, their bodies became invulnerable to harm, their skin impenetrable to blades.

Understandably, the evolution of the cult of François de Pâris to this bizarre convulsionism was decried, not only by Jesuits and constitutionnaires but by many Jansenists as well as a kind of fanaticism, or even as showing the influence of the Devil. First, these séances had a definite element of eroticism with the contorting young females moaning in pleasure upon being slapped and struck. But the crucifixions made it even harder to justify, and sometimes, during séances, convulsionnaires would feel compelled to commit blasphemies, like trampling on the Bible. However, many Jansenists were not ready to give up on the convulsonnaires, arguing that these acts represented a kind of tableau vivant, or living picture, that just needed interpretation to understand its symbolism. In this way, the crucifixions were said to be reenactments of Christ’s sacrifice, or more metaphorically, it was asserted that the painful convulsions represented the evil and the corruption in the church—specifically related to the papal bull Unigenitus, of course—and the secours, their violent relief, stood for the suffering that those faithful to true religion—the Jansensists—had to endure for the church to be redeemed. In this way, even trampling on the bible during convulsions could easily be explained as a representation of constitutionnaire apostasy or Jesuit heresy, and indecent exposure of female convulsionnaires could signify the licentiousness of the church. Still other Jansenists, unable to accept all that went on at these séances, argued that some discernment was required, and that, oddly, some of the acts of convulsionnaires were of divine origin while others were not, and it was up to leveler heads to distinguish which were which.

Depiction of a secouriste at work, via Wikimedia Commons

So what exactly is a modern, rational mind to think of the convulsionnaires? Really any view we might take of them was already entertained by some Englishtenment thinker of the day. What they may have called “hysteria,” we would otherwise consider a mass delusion, or a mania, encouraged by the power of suggestion and the desire to be part of a crowd and a shared experience. There is also the idea that some of these people suffered from genuine convulsions because of epilepsy, or even that many of them did. It is conceivable that, as experiencing convulsions became more and more associated with miracles and the divine, and as those who experience them were afforded some measure of respect in these circles, that people with epilepsy were drawn to these groups, or even recruited for their “gift.” As for their supposed invulnerability, this may have been a kind of parlor trick. The grands secours were administered by other members of the cult, so-called secouristes, who may have been careful not to hurt the convulsionnaires when they struck them and not to break the skin when they thrust the points of blades against them. It may have been more of a show after all, like televised wrestling, or more similar, like the séances of 19th century spiritualists. Other supernatural claims that were made about the convulsionnaires, such as that they exhibited clairvoyance or spoke in tongues or delivered elaborate sermons beyond their intellectual capability, could be as easily explained as many spiritualist tricks. We’re all well aware of the vague pronouncements that mediums and psychics use to fool people into thinking they have some preternatural knowledge. And glossolalia, or spontaneously speaking in an unknown tongue, by its very nature cannot be proven or disproven as genuine. As for the sermons, there were conflicting reports about this coming out of convulsionnaire séances. Some said they delivered elaborate sermons, while others described them as the rote repetition of statements obviously memorized beforehand. Likewise, reports from the séances contradict claims about convulsionnaire invulnerability. For every description of their being immune to harm, there are others describing young convulsionnaire women covered in blood and crawling on the floor as if in a trance. In the end, a sensible mind must dismiss the claims of supernatural acts as exaggerations amplified by Jansenist propagandists. 

Among those Jansenists bent on legitimizing the convulsionnaires in order not to lose the cult of François de Pâris as their principal claim to legitimacy and doctrinal truth in the schism, there were some who tended toward Millenarianism, the end-times philosophy that the current state of things would soon pass away, ushering in a thousand-year golden age for the church. From this view, the convulsionism in the cult of François de Pâris was but the last sputtering before rebirth, an apocalyptic sign of revolutionary change to come. As with most Millenarian thought, this meant the return of the prophet Elijah, who departed from our world in a whirlwind and a chariot of fire and was prophesied to return as a harbinger of the Messiah. Now in Christianity, some see John the Baptist as Elijah returned, though John denied it, and others look to Christ’s transfiguration, when Elijah appeared in the sky with Moses, like a force ghost out of Star Wars, and say that was Elijah’s return. Millenarians, however, believe Elijah will return at the beginning of the end to herald the Second Coming of Christ. Among Millenarian Jansenist apologists of the convulsionnaires, it was claimed that, surely, Elijah would appear from among these pious vessels of God’s miraculous work. In fact, an anonymous convulsionnaire author took it even further than this in a document called The Mysterious Calendar for the Year 1733 Exactly Calculated on the Apocalypse of John the Evangelist and on the Prophecy of Isaiah, which saw in the Book of Revelations references to the persecution of Jansenists by the Gallican Church. This work asserted that Louis XV was actually the Antichrist himself, for his name in Latin, Ludovicus, when translated into Roman numerals, added up to the number of the beast, 666, and through a couple similarly dubious proofs, settled on 1733 as the beginning of the end of the world. From this milieu, unsurprisingly, there emerged more than one figure willing to make claims that they were prophets of the end times. One was a convulsionnaire whose codename, or nom de convulsion, was Augustin. Frere Augustin, or Brother Augustin, declared himself to be the forerunner of the returned prophet Elijah, and he and his followers were said to consider themselves beyond good and evil, engaging in all kinds of blasphemous and licentious activities at their séances, though whether this is accurate or just the propaganda of constitutionnaires is hard to discern. Then there was Pierre Vaillant, a mild-mannered anticonstitutionnaire abbot and participant in convulsionnaire séances who actually declared himself to be Elijah returned, on a mission to convert the Jews. But Augustin did not confirm Vaillant as the Elijah he had foretold, so the movement just became more and more splintered.

Depiction of a convulsionnaire seance, from the book ‘Ceremonies et coutumes Religieuses…’ , by A. Moubach, 1727-1738. Out of copyright.

In the end, this is a story of schism upon schism, with one sect rising, only to have another sect born from its midst: the Jansenists, the anticonstituionnaires, the cult of François de Pâris, the convulsionnaires, the Millenarians, the so-called Augustinistes and the Vaillantistes. And these are just to name a few. I have actually simplified matter in this series, choosing not to define certain groups or movements like the appellants, the figurists, and the discernants just to try to make it more accessible. As this became more and more complicated, each group came to represent or contain some element that its predecessor could not stomach. So the Jansenists turned on the cult of François de Pâris when the convulsionism took over, and many of the followers of François de Pâris, who retained some sense of propriety and decorum, turned on the fanaticism and excesses of the convulsionnaires when they evolved to include the secours, and the convulsionnaires, many of whom still stuck to their conservative Jansenist theology, rejected the Augustinistes and Vaillantistes for their blasphemy and heresy. In the end, the outrageous doctrines of these sects actually did much to heal the divisions between the sovereign court, the Gallican Church, and the king, for none could stand behind a sect that called the king of France the Antichrist. So eventually, the Parliament of Paris abandoned the convulsionnaires as a cause celebre and worked with Cardinal Fleury to indict Frere Augustin and the worst of the Augustiniste fanatics. With the Parliament no longer countering their every move, ecclesiastical authorities moved to erase this modern age of miracles by officially denying all the cures attributed to François de Pâris, even the early ones that the Archbishop before Vintimille had previously confirmed to be genuine. A final story should serve to illustrate how entirely the power of the cult of François de Pâris and its convulsionnaires had waned. In 1737, after years of working on it in exile, the parliamentarian named Montgeron, whose conversion to convulsionism I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, completed a huge book compiling all the evidence in favor of the miracles attributed to François de Pâris, called The Truth of the Miracles Operated at the Intercession of Monsieur Pâris. Despite having previously been exiled, he dressed up in his finest clothes and strolled into the palace at Versaille, where he handed Louis XV his volume and urged him to read it. In response, King Louis had him tossed in prison for the rest of his life and ordered all copies of the book to be publicly burned.

Now this is not to say that the convulsionism of the followers of François de Pâris disappeared overnight. Their séances and sect persisted in ever dwindling numbers even long after Archbishop Vintimille and Cardinal Fleury and King Louis XV were gone. And it is completely reasonable to consider this entire affair as having made a definite contribution to not only the eventual French Revolution, but also to the emergence of Enlightenment thought and the modern world. While for the most part, the cult at Saint-Médard never expressed any revolutionary sentiment, the ecclesiastical and political struggles they exacerbated certainly seem to have weakened royal authority over the parliament, and likewise, parliamentary resistance to ecclesiastical authority created concrete rifts in the marriage of church and state. Additionally, the fact that the church and the sovereign court and the power of the throne all were forced to struggle with a group of pious commoners, and that even despite the exercise of power to destroy them, they persisted in secret, creating their own egalitarian religious organizations, speaks to the tendency in France at the time toward democratic ideals. Furthermore, and ironically, though this was a modern age of miracles, in the long run it had the counterintuitive effect of reducing the importance of miracles in the church. The lengths to which the church went to explain away the purported miracles, or to suggest they represented something diabolical, resulted in skepticism being the standard reaction to such claims. More than this, the fanaticism that appeared during this affair encouraged the philosophes of the French High Enlightenment in their attacks on religion and claims of the supernatural, helping to usher in the modern age of rationalism and materialism. Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out this irony best when he suggested that the miracles at Saint-Medard were better attested to than those of Jesus Christ himself, and so in working so hard to undermine and disprove those miracles, the church had unwittingly provided skeptics with the arguments needed to refute even the wonders performed by Jesus.

Further Reading

Kreiser, B. Robert. Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Radner, Ephraim. Spirit and Nature: The Saint-Médard Miracles in 18th-Century Jansenism. Herder & Herder, 2002.

Strayer, Bryan E. Suffering Saints: Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in France, 1640-1799. Sussex Academic Press, 2008.

The Jansenist Miracles of Enlightenment France, Part One: The Thaumaturges

On the 24th of March, 1656, at Port-Royal Abbey in Paris, a young woman named Marguerite Perrier who boarded with the nuns there, knelt to kiss a relic that had recently been given to the abbey. It was a thorn claimed to be from the crown of thorns forced onto Christ’s head. Now young Marguerite Perrier had long suffered from an ulcerous sore in the corner of her eye, something the doctors called a lachrymal fistula, which caused her face to swell and a terrible smelling discharge to come from her eye and nostril. In kneeling to kiss this Holy Thorn, hopeful that this relic of Christ might do for her what medicine never could, she allowed the thorn to touch her disfiguring sore. Thereafter, Perrier claimed that she had been healed of her malady, and her claims were later upheld by doctors. This, in addition to a number of other cures associated with the Holy Thorn, resulted in an official recognition of the miracle and the relic by the Catholic Church, but also in great disagreement over what the miracle meant. Port-Royal Abbey was a stronghold of adherents to a Catholic sect known as Jansenists who had caused something of a doctrinal schism in the church. Indeed, young Marguerite Perrier’s uncle was Blaise Pascal, a Jansenist theologian who just three months before his niece’s supposed miracle had written a denunciation of the Jesuits, a principal enemy of the Jansenists. So, while the Jansenists viewed the Holy Thorn miracles as proof that God was on their side, the Jesuits and other enemies of Jansenism in the church argued that such a miracle could have happened anywhere the Holy Thorn might have been and testified only to the relic’s power, or alternatively suggested that God only sent miracles to intercede because of rampant sin, suggesting the Holy Thorn miracles occurred at Port-Royal because the Jansenists there were flirting with heresy. The Holy Thorn miracles would not be the only supposed supernatural phenomena associated with Jansenism to occur in Enlightenment France, and just as at Port-Royal, the way that these supposedly miraculous happenings were rationalized by skeptics and believers alike to support conflicting sides of ongoing ecclesiastical and political struggles offers fascinating insight into the significance of wonder-working in the popular and modern mind.

*

In France, decades before the famous Holy Thorn miracles at Port-Royal, René Descartes commenced a career in philosophy that many consider the beginning of modern thought, and half a century after those miraculous healings, in the early 1700s, philosophes like Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire would make France the epicenter of the High Enlightenment. And yet, at the very same time, amid this burgeoning modernity, the great awakening of logic and rational thought, a tumultuous conflict of fanaticism and mania and widespread claims of unexplainable prodigies threatened to drag France back to a darker age. These claims of the supernatural were raised in cults that worshiped magicians, but in a completely different sense than one might imagine today upon hearing those words. Rather than magician, the more appropriate word would be thaumaturge, from the Greek meaning worker of marvels or wonders. And when I say cult, I mean it in the oldest sense of the word, with roots in pre-Christian paganism, as a group that practices the veneration of one of these wonderworkers. In antiquity, these might have been living miracle workers, but as Christian traditions became established throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the church managed to keep them focused more on the dead, venerating martyrs and saints at their tombs. But just because they were dead did not mean these thaumaturges could not work their wonders. Indeed, as I mentioned in my last new episode on Joseph of Cupertino, the posthumous working of miracles, typically healings, used to be a central requirement of canonization. So it was that the tombs of holy men were sometimes haunted by pilgrims not only paying homage but testing the waters to see if perhaps a miracle might occur, indicating they had a saint on their hands. These weren’t just any dead clerics, but rather those who were suspected to have died “in the odor of sanctity,” meaning in a state of grace and without sin, and sometimes more literally meaning that an actual smell emanated from their corpses, sometimes because of the stigmata, or wounds corresponding to Christ’s that were said to appear on the bodies of some saints. In early 18th century France, as with the Holy Thorn miracles, an unusual number of these cults sprang up around Jansenist figures, thereby further stirring the doctrinal disputes surrounding the group, and eventually leading to the most bizarre string of miracles in history, a dramatic conflict between church and state, and an upheaval of religious persecution and defiance of secular authority that contributed to the French Revolution.

Portrait of Marguerite Perrier kneeling before the Holy Thorn at Port-Royal Abbey, via Wikimedia Commons

In order to lay the groundwork for all the fantastical claims that would unfold in 18th century Paris, we must understand one of the most complicated doctrinal disputes of all time: the conflict between the Jansenists and the rest of the church, which began long before the Holy Thorn miracles and evolved through various subsequent ecclesiastical clashes. It arose during the counter-reformation, the revival of the Gallican or French Catholic Church in the early 1600s, among theologians and dogmatists, and can be seen as a reaction to or criticism of Jesuit theology, thus the Jesuit attack on Port-Royal and its Holy Thorn miracles. The name for this school of thought in Catholicism was taken from a Dutch theologian, Cornelius Jansen, whose deathbed treatise on the teachings of St. Augustine emphasized certain beliefs about original sin, grace, contrition, and predestination that did not conform to Christian doctrine as established at the Council of Trent. But more than that, the Jansenist movement represented a challenge to church authority and a democratizing influence in religion, for Jansenists believed that even the lay people should have some better understanding of doctrine and their salvation, whereas the church had always kept such theological finer points to themselves as the specialized knowledge that was their privilege. First Cardinal Richelieu, the powerful French statesman and clerical authority, and then his successor Cardinal Mazarin both waged a war of persecution on Jansenist clergy, locking them up and suppressing their views. As leading figures like Antoine Arnauld, writing from Port-Royal, defended their doctrines, they saw themselves condemned over and over by Pope Urban VIII, Pope Pius V, Pope Gregory XIII, and Pope Innocent X, who promulgated a constitution denying certain tenets of Jansenism. This resulted in the French church attempting to bring the Jansenists to heel by asking them to sign a Formula of Submission. Jansenists refused, deepening this schism. This was the context in which the miracle of the Holy Thorn took place and was, not surprisingly, promptly politicized. But it wouldn’t be the end of this controversy, or the last miraculous sign that had to be interpreted by both sides of the conflict.

After this Formulary Controversy, in which Jansenists refused to submit, the group found themselves at odds with both the church and the state, for King Louis XIV had been convinced that the Jansenists’ real crime was a denial of the church’s infallibility, which in turn was tantamount to defiance of his own authority as protector of the Gallican Church. The de facto leader of the Jansenists after Antoine Arnauld’s death, Pasquier Quesnel, ended up imprisoned for a time and then on the run in Amsterdam, and Louis XIV demanded that Pope Clement XI take action against Quesnel and his writings. In response, another apostolic constitution was promulgated, Unigenitus Dei Filius, which condemned 101 of Quesnel’s propositions as heretical, deepening the schism and cementing the factions into two camps, the so-called constitutionnaires who supported Unigenitus and the unrepentant Jansenist anticonstitutionnaires. Amidst all of this furor, Jansenists continually looked to miracles as proof that God was on their side. It had worked with the Holy Thorn, so why not again? Whenever some worthy Jansenist abbé or bishop expired, some miraculous healing or another was said to have transpired at their tombs. None of these ever truly took hold of the public imagination as had the Holy Thorn, however, and perhaps it was because the claims had come from among the circle of Jansenist insiders at Port-Royal, making them suspect. However, in 1725, a more public miracle claimed by a cabinetmaker’s wife gave them something stronger to tout. Madame Lafosse was her name, and while walking in the procession of the Holy Sacrament at the parish of Sainte-Marguerite in Paris, she claimed to be cured of a hemorrhaging condition and a partial paralysis that had long afflicted her. This miracle was authenticated by the church and said to be proof of Christ’s Real Presence in the sacrament—in other words, their wafers and wine must truly be Christ’s flesh and blood to have effected such a cure. But soon the Jansenists claimed the miracle as proof of God’s sympathy with their cause because the priest who had blessed this particular sacrament, it turned out, was an anticonstitutionnaire.

Pope Clement XI enthroned while portraits of Jansen and Quesnel are trampled and destroyed before him, via Wikimedia Commons

While this debate over the significance of Madame Lafosse’s healing raged on, numerous other miraculous cures began to be reported, all connected to the Jansenists in some way. Some miracles came from a certain church in the hands of Jansenist canons, while others were attributed to relics that had belonged to Father Pasquier Quesnel. Several were cured of afflictions at the tomb of a little known Jansenist priest named Sauvage. Also, a canon in the abbey of Avenay named Gérard Rousse passed away in the odor of sanctity yet because of his opposition to the papal bull Unigenitus had been denied last sacraments and burial on sacred ground; nevertheless, two people claimed to be miraculously healed at his burial place. These Jansenist thaumaturges were not just posthumous wonderworkers either. In early 1727, a Jansenist Archbishop Barchman gave his benediction to a woman in Amsterdam who, according to 170 witnesses, was thereafter healed of several maladies that doctors had deemed incurable, and a couple months later in Lyon, an anticonstitutionnaire father named Celoron was said to have restored the sight of a 3-year-old who had been blinded by smallpox. These miracles tended to draw only limited interest, however, and in some cases, such as Rousse’s, authorities in the church actually forbade pilgrimages to the tombs of Jansenists who appeared to be gathering a cult, thereby keeping any of these miracles from gaining the fame that would have really marshalled support to the anticonstitutionnaire cause. They would not be so successful, however, in trying to suppress the cult of another Jansenist thaumaturge: François de Pâris, whose posthumous miracles would finally bring the renown that Jansenists needed, but whose cult would eventually become something far different than expected, in the end doing more harm than good to the Jansenist cause.  

Most of what we know about the priest with the exceedingly French name François de Pâris comes to us from biography written after the emergence of his cult and so may be less trustworthy than we would like. It’s said that he came from a background of wealth, with his father involved in politics, but that he had been drawn to a life of piety at a young age. His family actually discouraged this, intending for their son to study law, which he did as a dutiful son before eventually joining the clergy regardless of the wishes of his family, who in retaliation partially disinherited him. At seminary, he was influenced by Jansenist theologians and developed a strong anticonstitutionnaire stance on the controversy over Unigenitus. Taking to heart the Jansenist teachings on austerity and charity, he took what was left of his inheritance and gave it to clothe the poor. Known to embody the meekness and asceticism espoused by Jansenists, he refused to be made a deacon because he felt himself too sinful and thus unworthy of the office, and instead chose to live out his days in squalid poverty and isolation, believing that his own suffering was done in penitence for the church at large, which had fallen into sin because of Unigenitus. He chose the poor Paris suburb of Saint-Marceau to seclude himself, and when not in isolation in his gloomy, unfurnished living quarters, he became well known in his community for giving away the woolen stockings he made and for cleaning the neglected streets. Thus he already had something of a saintly reputation when, in May 1727, due to declining health brought on by his fasting and physical mortifications, he died, the last words on his lips, supposedly, being a reiteration of his opposition to the papal bull Unigenitus. Almost immediately the beginnings of a cult could be observed as crowds of common folk came to see him in his simple coffin, wanting to press their rosaries to his corpse in order to imbue them with his sanctity or to cut off some relic such as a lock of his hair or even a fingernail. Some claimed that he did not appear to be dead, but rather retained the color of vitality in his face.

Portrait of François de Pâris, via Wikimedia Commons

In attendance on the day François de Pâris was buried in a little cemetery in the churchyard of Saint-Médard was an elderly widow whose arm had been paralyzed for 20 years. After kissing the feet of his corpse and praying for his intercession, she was immediately healed! Or so she claimed, six year later. However, certainly some miracle like the one this widow claimed to have received must have been rumored, for soon many afflicted people began traveling to François de Pâris’s graveside to pray for a miracle cure or take some relic for themselves. Within a year, he was no longer in a modest grave but rather entombed at Saint-Médard, in a black marble slab raised on stone pillars high enough for pilgrims to prostrate themselves and crawl beneath him. During summer the next year, after a dozen or so claimed miracles, the church began investigations for the canonization process. Especially convincing, it seemed, were the healings of Pierre Lero, whose ulcerated leg had troubled him more than a year; Marie-Jeanne Orget, who had been afflicted with a skin condition on her legs for thirty years; Elizabeth Loe, who had been dealing with a swollen breast for a year and a half; and Marie-Madeleine Mossaron, whose left side was paralyzed and whose other side suffered frequent convulsions. Although the bishop in charge of the investigations was inclined to declare the miracles authentic and thus to canonize de Pâris, the royal government, aware that this would become fodder for the Jansenists, pulled rank and made sure that de Pâris would never be consecrated a saint. This had little effect on the increasing numbers of pilgrims to his tomb, however, for most of the sick and devout visitors to François de Pâris’s resting place had little understanding of the ecclesiastical political turmoil roiling in the background. Eventually, however, the constitutionnaire forces who were troubled by the growing cult at Saint-Médard would take further action to quash their worship of this thaumaturge, and the supposed miracles of François de Pâris would be further politicized.

It took a while, but in the spring of 1731, just as church officials had feared, Jansenists began to exploit the ongoing miracles among the cult of François de Pâris at the Saint-Médard cemetery as proofs of the righteousness of the anticonstitutionnaire position. In the last couple of years, as the Saint-Médard cult was growing, the government had increased its efforts to impose the Unigenitus Bull by making it not only a judgment on Church dogma but also a binding law of the State, a maneuver many thought would finally stamp out Jansenist thought. However, magistrates in the sovereign court, many of whom had Jansenist leanings, objected to this royal declaration and frustrated its enforcement. Thus we already see how the political turmoil caused by this controversy may have helped place France on the path to revolution. Despite uncertainty over the validity of the royal decree in the court and pushback among magistrates, within the Church, it was treated as a mandate, and Cardinal Fleury, chief minister of Louis XV, as well as Archbishop Vintimille of Paris, began to purge the church of any parish priests they suspected of being Jansensists. One day, angered by the suspension of her priest, a woman by the name of Anne Lefranc traveled to Saint-Médard to pray for the intercession of François de Pâris. This old spinster had been partially paralyzed and blind in one eye for almost thirty years, a condition that doctors had called incurable, and she hoped that this thaumaturge’s powers could heal her, not so much because she desired to be healed but rather, as she explained it, so that she might “make manifest the justice of the cause of her legitimate pastor.” Within a few days of her visit to the tomb, she reported that her blindness and paralysis were entirely healed, which stood as proof, she asserted, that her priest had been unjustly removed from his position. The case of Anne Lefranc took the miracles at Saint-Médard and thrust them into the center of this political struggle, and in the process made them something of a sensation and a spectacle that all of Paris began to talk about.

A woman lies on the marble slab at M. de Pâris’s tomb hoping to be miraculously healed, from Wellcome Images, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0), as per Wikimedia Commons.

Once again, the debate over what a miracle signified ensued, like trying to decipher the language of God. Of course, anticonstitutionnaires saw it as a sign of God’s favor on not only the woman healed, but by extension the priest she had been praying for, and thus all those priests opposed to Unigenitus who had been wrongfully suspended from their parishes. To them, it was clear; the miracles at Saint-Médard were a message to the rest of the church that they were in error for persecuting Jansenists. On the defensive, the constitutionnaires objected to Jansenists declaring the Lefranc miracle genuine without the proper authority. Conducting their own investigation, Cardinal Fleury and Archbishop Vintimille came to the quite different conclusion that the Lefranc cure was a hoax. Doctors brought in to examine Lefranc declared that her paralysis should never have been called incurable, for it was a “hysterical” condition, related to “menstrual irregularity.” And far from being cured of it, she still afterward had difficulty walking. Moreover, Lefranc’s own brother and mother swore that she had never been blind in one eye. Then, in his written declaration, Archbishop Vintimille implied that a conspiracy was afoot, and that Jansenists had put her up to the charade, coached her, and afterward attempted to authenticate their fraud by soliciting and extorting witnesses. In return, the anticonstitutionnaires called Fleury and Vintimille’s own investigation a fraud, suggesting they had bribed doctors to say what they desired and bullied witnesses into recanting, omitting any testimony that did not fit their narrative. Where the truth lies is hard to discern, but the questions this episode raises remain intriguing.

Could Vintimille’s explanation of Lefranc’s claims actually provide a rational explanation for all of the Jansenist miracles, even as far back as Marguerite Perrier’s healing by the Holy Thorn at Port-Royal? Could the Jansenists have conceived of a scheme to stage miracles in order to bolster their cause? Was it really as simple as paying off or threatening witnesses to get their testimony? And later, realizing that they need not stage them, did they perhaps wait for claims of miracles that they might declare to be proofs of God’s favor for their cause, for whatever reason, even just that a Jansenist had previously ministered to one who later experienced a miracle? If so, how then to explain these miraculous cures that they only exploited after the fact? Vintimille’s assertion that Lefranc’s condition was “hysterical,” while reflecting the misogyny and poor knowledge of physiology of its day, might actually have a valid point. Today, rather than attributing a condition to “hysteria” or anything related to female anatomy or psychology, we would speak of psychogenic or psychosomatic conditions—afflictions without a physical cause that might have more of a psychological cause. Both of Lefranc’s conditions, partial blindness and paralysis, are sometimes known to be neurological symptoms, perhaps caused by a psychological trigger—what psychiatrists today might term a conversion disorder. If such symptoms can be triggered psychologically, it stands to reason that a sudden cure could also be psychologically triggered, and praying at the tomb of a thaumaturge said to perform miraculous healings might be just the suggestive trigger needed. Looking back, most of the Jansenist miracles appear to be the spontaneous healings of conditions that may have been psychological: the partial paralysis of Madame Lafosse in the sacramental procession, the blindness of the 3-year-old healed by Father Celoron, the partial paralysis of the widow that kissed François de Pâris’s feet, and the paralysis and convulsions of Marie-Madeleine Mossaron. And as the army of sick and pious pilgrims arriving at Saint-Médard grew in proportion with the expectation of miracles occurring, did this just increase the chances that people suffering from psychological conditions would show up and then convince themselves that they had been miraculously cured?

A depiction of the cemetery at Saint-Médard overrun with pilgrims, from the book ‘Ceremonies et coutumes Religieuses…’ , by A. Moubach, 1727-1738. Out of copyright.

In a further effort to curb the growth of François de Pâris’s cult so that no further miracles could be exploited by the anticonstitutionnaires, Archbishop Vintimille declared that further observances at Saint-Médard were forbidden. But this did nothing to stop the crowds that every day arrived with the expectation of miracles being performed. And they weren’t disappointed. In just that year, 1731, around 70 miracles were reported and assiduously recorded by Jansenists who wanted to do everything they could to authenticate the miracles taking place there. Some claimed immediate healing, and among these were complaints like blindness, deafness, and paralysis. Other afflictions were diseases or infections or cancers, but their healing was not always immediate, sometimes occurring gradually after their visit to the tomb, which raises the possibility that the illnesses may have simply run their course naturally. Perhaps the most unusual miracles that occurred at Saint-Médard, though, were the countermiracles, or divine punishments that it was believed the thaumaturge François de Pâris meted out to disbelievers and those who came to his tomb determined to fake a miracle and thereby discredit the cult. One woman faked paralysis to mock the supplicants and was actually struck down with a real paralysis. Of course, this too could be explained as a psychological trigger of a conversion disorder, but the result was that she became convert. Thus the numbers of the devoted swelled and swelled, a boon to nearby hotels and cafés, but a worry to the royal government, which responded by posting police around the cemetery. Now this supernatural flap of miraculous healings had become a social powder keg, and before long, it would ignite in the strangest fire imaginable.

Further Reading

Kreiser, B. Robert. Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Radner, Ephraim. Spirit and Nature: The Saint-Médard Miracles in 18th-Century Jansenism. Herder & Herder, 2002.

Strayer, Bryan E. Suffering Saints: Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in France, 1640-1799. Sussex Academic Press, 2008.