SERVETUS REACHES GENEVA—DETAINED THERE, HE IS ARRESTED AT THE INSTANCE OF CALVIN.

Escaped from the Dauphinal prison of Vienne, Servetus must, in all likelihood, have found hiding at first with friends in Lyons. But there, as indeed anywhere else in France, his life was in imminent danger; so that for his own sake, as well as that of his friends, terribly compromised by his presence, he had to seek safety at a distance—even in another country. Nor was it present safety only that was in question: the means of living in time to come had further to be thought of. But master of a profession that is welcome everywhere, he may have had little anxiety on that score; and he who had lived so long unmolested as Villeneuve or Villanovanus, after compromising himself as Serveto, alias RevÉs, would have been at no loss to find another name to shield him from recognition. His first thoughts carried him in the direction of Spain, but he found so many difficulties from the French gendarmerie, that he turned back; believing then that the best course he could follow would be to betake himself to Naples, where he knew there was a large settled population of his own countrymen, among whom he would find a sufficient field for the exercise of his calling.

Calvin—erroneously beyond question—speaks of Servetus having wandered for four months in Italy after his escape from the prison of Vienne. Had he reached Italian ground at this time, he would not have returned upon Geneva, and then—presuming that he escaped Calvin’s further pursuit—he might have lived, usefully engaged, to a good old age, and died quietly in his bed. Servetus arrived in Switzerland from the side of France, and must have been in hiding in that country, or wandering about in disguise from place to place between April 7, the date of his evasion from Vienne, and the middle of July when he reached Geneva. The hue and cry from Vienne was probably not of a kind to be heard afar; they who left the prison door open may have seen to that—Servetus indeed says himself that they did. It was not such, at all events, as to prevent his baffling pursuit and escaping recognition: for he entered Geneva in safety; and feeling the soil of a state beneath his feet where other than Roman Catholic views of religion prevailed, he could hardly have thought that he would suffer molestation did he but keep quiet during the day or two he meant to remain in order to rest and recruit.

The experience Servetus had had so lately must have satisfied him that he could hope for nothing from the forbearance of Calvin; but he did not mean to put this to the test: his business was to make no noise, and to be gone as quickly as possible. Though he had made the latter part of his journey on horseback, the usual mode of locomotion in those days, he even deemed it prudent, as less likely to attract attention, to enter Geneva on foot. He therefore discharged his steed at Louyset, a village a few miles distant, where he passed the night, and reached the city in the early morning of some day after the middle of July, 1553. Putting up at a small hostelry on the banks of the lake, having the sign of the Rose, he appears to have lain there privily and unchallenged for nearly a month.

What could have induced Servetus to linger in a place where we see, from the precautions he took both in arriving and subsequently, that he could not have thought himself safe, long remained a mystery; but is cleared up in a great measure by the information we obtain through the particulars of the trial to which he was immediately subjected, and of which it is only of late years that a full and entirely satisfactory account has been obtained. We were disposed, at one time, to ascribe the delay in setting out for Italy to the fascination which the strong have over the weak, and to imagine that our wanderer was still anxious for the personal interview with Calvin he had formerly sought, but been forced to forego, in Paris, and for which, as we learn by the letter of Calvin to his friend Farel, he had made fresh proposals at a later date.67 He was now aware, however, that it was by Calvin he had been denounced to the authorities of Lyons and Vienne, arrested in consequence, put upon his trial, and only saved his life by escaping from prison. He could not possibly, therefore, have flattered himself that the man who was so disposed towards him would receive him in any friendly mood; though it probably never came into his mind to imagine that the Reformer would be disposed to take the knife in hand himself.

As we now read the tale, we perceive that Servetus’s presence in Geneva could not have been unknown to all in the city, even from the day of his arrival; and our persuasion is, that for some time at least he was kept there against his will. On his trial we find him stating, incidentally, that the windows of the room he occupied at the Rose had been nailed up! What interpretation can possibly be put on this? The nailing up could not have been done to keep anyone out of a place of public entertainment. It was therefore to keep someone in. Servetus must in fact have been anxious from the first to be gone; but he was detained by certain parties in Geneva, not among the number of Calvin’s friends, who thought to make political capital out of his presence among them.

Nor were it hard to imagine that he, smarting as he then was under the sense of all that had but just befallen him through the interference of the Reformer, and listening for the moment to the influential persons who promised him support, and possibly redress, was not altogether indisposed to pay his enemy back for the irreparable injury he had suffered at his hands. But there is nothing in all we know of Michael Servetus that leads us for a moment to think of him as a revengeful man; and though he may have lent an ear for a while to the suggestions of his new friends, he must soon have come to conceive misgivings as to the real meaning of their attentions.

Even whilst lying hidden in his inn he could hardly have failed, after a while, to learn something of the state of political partisanship prevalent in the theocratic republican city of Geneva, and so have been more than ever anxious to be gone. Hence the nailing up of his chamber windows. On Sunday, August 13, he had even spoken to the landlord of the ‘Rose’ to procure him a boat for the morrow, to take him by the Lake as far as possible on his way to ZÜrich. But his resolution to delay his departure no longer was taken too late. Weary of confinement, and always piously disposed, he ventured imprudently to show himself at the evening service of a neighbouring church; and being there recognised, intimation of his presence in Geneva was conveyed to Calvin, who, without loss of a moment, and in spite of the sacredness of the day, denounced him to one of the Syndics, and demanded his immediate arrest.

To effect this in the city of Geneva of the year of grace 1553 was no matter of difficulty, little being made in those days of seizing on the person, and not much of taking the life. The accredited officer, armed with a warrant, found Servetus in his inn; informed him he was to consider himself a prisoner; led him away, and threw him into the common jail of the town.