Theodore Beza

Theodore Beza (Theodore de Beze or de Besze) (June 24, 1519 - October 13, 1605) was a French Protestant Christian theologian and scholar who played an important role in the early Reformation. He was closely associated with Calvinism. He lived most of his adult life in Switzerland.

Last Days

After that time Beza's activity was confined

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more and more to the affairs of his home. His

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faithful wife Claudine had died childless in 1588,

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a few days before he went to the Bern Disputation.

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Forty years they had lived happily

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together. He contracted, on the

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advice of his friends, a second marriage

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with Catharina del Piano, a Genoese

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widow, in order to have a helpmate in his declining

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years. Up to his sixty-fifth year he enjoyed

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excellent health, but after that a gradual sinking

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of his vitality became perceptible. He was active

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in teaching till Jan., 1597.

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The saddest experience

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in his old days was the conversion of King Henry IV

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to Roman Catholicism, in spite of his most earnest

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exhortations (1593). Strange to say, in 1596 the

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report was spread by the Jesuits in Germany,

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France, England, and Italy that Beza and the

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Church of Geneva had returned into the bosom of

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Rome, and Beza replied in a satire that revealed

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the possession still of his old fire of thought and

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vigor of expression.

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He died in Geneva. He was not buried, like

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Calvin, in the general cemetery, Plain-Palais (for

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the Savoyards had threatened to abduct his body

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to Rome), but at the direction of the magistrates,

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in the monastery of St. Pierre.

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