Desirous of basing their teaching upon the only authority recognised by the Reformation, Lefevre d’Etaples and Briçonnet published the four Gospels in French. The bishop commanded his receiver to distribute them gratuitously to the poor, and to do so, spared, says Crespin, neither gold nor silver. Every one began to read them. Sundays and feast-days were devoted to this study. The Testament was even carried into the fields and workshops, to be at hand at meal-times; and these poor people asked each other: “How can they help us, these saints, when they have so much to do to help themselves? Our only mediator is Jesus Christ.”
As they became serious in their religious views, a reformation of manners followed. Blasphemy, drunkenness, quarrels, disorders of all kinds, gave way to a pure and more decent habit of living. The movement spread far and near. The day-labourers of Picardy and other places, who came at harvest-time to work in the neighbourhood of Meaux, returned home with the seeds of the doctrines they had heard preached. Hence the beginnings of several churches. This influence was so great, that it became a proverbial way of speaking in France, in the first half of the sixteenth century, to designate all the opponents of Rome by the name of heretics of Meaux.
At the same period, Briçonnet sent the translation of the Bible to the sister of Francis I., Marguérite de Valois, who read and caused it to be read by those around her. Everything thus augured a very rapid success for the French Reformation, when the hand of persecution interfered to arrest it.
II.
The priests and monks of the diocese of Meaux, seeing their credit daily weakened, and their revenues diminishing, carried their complaints before the Sorbonne. They met with a favourable reception. The Sorbonne, railed at by men of letters, and attacked by the innovators, was in the difficult position of an ancient institution outstripped by public opinion. It felt that if it did not hasten to strike a great blow, it would be lost.
At the head of this faculty of theology was one Noël Beda, or Bedier, a doctor with no great learning, but active, bold, sharp in disputation, capable of upsetting everything for a theological point, and ready to look to the populace for support, in the absence of more creditable allies. His acolytes were the Masters Duchène and Lecouturier, who wholly swayed their brethren by the violence of their passions and their language.
Luther was invited to the Sorbonne, in 1521, for an examination of his book upon the Captivity of Babylon. This company declared that his doctrine was blasphemous, insolent, impious, shameful, and that it ought to be opposed with no other arguments than fire and sword. They compared Luther to the great heresiarchs, and to Mahomet himself, and demanded that he should be compelled by every possible means to make a public retractation. The mild Melancthon forgot his accustomed moderation in answering this sentence, which he termed the mad decree of the theologasters of Paris. “How unfortunate is France,” he said, “to have such doctors as these!”
The theologians of the Sorbonne received the complainants of Meaux with open arms, and as a bishop was implicated in the cause, they demanded that the Parliament of Paris should interpose with a strong hand.
The Parliament had no affection for the monks, and distrusted the priests. It had maintained and defended against them, with persevering energy, the rights of lay jurisdiction. But it held for a fundamental maxim of the state this motto of the olden times: Une foi, une loi, un roi;—one faith, one law, one king,—and did not believe that there ought to be tolerated in the same country two religions, any more than two governments.
The chancellor, Antoine Duprat, used all his authority to urge the magistrature to violent measures—a man without religion, without morals, bishop and archbishop; without having ever put foot in his dioceses, inventor of the venality of incumbencies, a subscriber to the Concordat which excited the indignation of the Parliaments and even of the clergy, elected cardinal for having humiliated the kingdom before the Holy See—he accused himself on his death-bed of having followed no other law than his own interest, and the interest of his king only next to his own. Antoine Duprat had amassed enormous riches; and when he built, at the Hôtel Dieu of Paris, the new hall for the sick, Francis I. said, “He must enlarge it indeed, if it is to hold all the poor he has made.”