The relations between the Huguenots and the Puritans thus so unexpectedly revealed are still uncertainly known. As early as 1574, La Rochelle had been in close touch with the extreme Elizabethan Puritans, Walter Travers causing one of his works of controversy to be printed there.[163] In 1590 two of the Martin Marprelate tracts were issued from the presses of La Rochelle,[164] and Waldegrave, one of the factious printers, took refuge there. During the Civil War there seem to have been active negotiations going on between some of the Parliamentary leaders and the Bordeaux malcontents. These found the doctrines of the Levellers more to their taste than the more moderate schemes of Cromwell, Ireton, and the "grandees." They even sketched out for France, or at least Guyenne, a Republican Constitution. For those who have been taught to explain the French Revolution by racial theories, nothing is more disconcerting than to learn how the ancestors of the Revolutionists caught some of their most advanced ideas from their English co-religionists. They clamoured for a representative assembly, liberty of conscience, trials by jury, the abolition of privileges. "The peasant," they wrote, "is as free as a prince, coming into this world without either wooden shoes or saddle, even as the king's son without a crown on his head. So every one is by birth equally free and has the power to choose his own government."[165] If it is astounding enough to hear almost a century and a half before the fall of the Bastille the cry of liberty and equality, it is startling to think that the English had raised it.
The tragedy enacted at Whitehall on 30th January 1648-49, stirred up in Europe a horror equal only to that caused nearly a century and a half later by the execution of Louis XVI. of France. "We gave ourselves up," wrote Bochart, "to tears and afflictions, and solemnised the obsequies of your King by universal mourning."[166] One of the most distinguished laymen in the Rouen congregation, Porrée the physician, declared that "all true Protestants abhorred that execrable parricide."[167]
The Doctors of the Church delivered their opinion in emphatic terms. In 1650 two works appeared exalting the royal prerogative.[168] Amyraut, the latitudinarian professor of Saumur, was the author of one of them;[169] Bochart that of the other.[170] Their argument is mainly Biblical. The kings being God's vice-regents, are accountable only to Him. To sit in judgment upon them, to inflict them bodily injury, is heinous sacrilege. "Kings are absolute and depend only on God; it is never allowed to attempt their lives on any pretence whatsoever."[171] Yet Amyraut recorded a remarkable reservation in which the regicides could have found their justification: "Except there be an express command, proceeding from God directly, such as those given to Ehud and Jehu, nothing may be attempted against the kings without committing an offence more hateful to God than the most execrable parricide."[172] Dr. Gauden's _Eikon Basiliké_ had a great success in France, two translations penned by Huguenots appearing, that of Denys Cailloué[173] in 1649, that of Porrée[174] a year later. Lastly, all students of English literature remember that Claude de Saumaise wrote the _Defensio regia pro Carolo Primo_, and Pierre Du Moulin the _Clamor sanguinis regiæ ad coelum contra parricidas Anglicanos_ (1652). The Huguenots showed zeal not only in condemning the King's execution and in vindicating his memory from the charges of the Commonwealthsmen, but in furthering the Restoration of his son, Charles II., by proclaiming his title to the Crown of England.[175]