History of the Protestants of France, from the commencement of the Reformation to the present time

by G. de Félice

Intelligent and devoted, she had rendered her brother Francis I., during his captivity at Madrid, services not to be forgotten, and had acquired over him an influence which she turned to the profit of the new ideas.

Francis I. never well knew what he was, or what he wished, on the subject of religion. Endowed with qualities more brilliant than solid, he often mistook the variations of his humour for profound calculations. Proud, beyond all things, of being thought a knightly king, he had a passion for arms and adventures of gallantry, which distinguished the older chivalry, but without its stern loyalty and nice sense of honour. The Italy of the Borgias and the Machiavels had corrupted him, and if he had not protected the men of letters, who have acquitted themselves before posterity most generously of their debt to him, one might ask if he had anything but the appearance of the virtues, which have gained for him the appellation of a great king.

The Reformation pleased him as an engine for attacking the monks, whom he contemned; but it repulsed, by its austere maxims, a prince who had filled his court with female favourites. The priests, beside, never ceased to represent to him the followers of the new religion as the enemies of all social order. The historian Seckendorf cites a letter, dated from the French court in 1530, where they are accused of seeking the fall of princes, perfect equality of rights, and even the rupture of marriages and the community of goods. Francis I. was much alarmed at these calumnies, and Brantôme reports that he said: “These novelties have no other aim than the destruction of all monarchy, human and divine.”

This enables us to understand why, in certain moments of his reign, although he was not naturally cruel, he showed such pitiless hostility against the Reformers. He was impressed with the notion that he was acting as a statesman, and he sought to smother in a sea of blood, the sinister phantoms with which the (Roman) Catholic clergy had peopled his imagination.

Otherwise, it was a strange and interesting scene to witness the struggle between Marguérite de Valois and her brother, upon the conduct to be pursued towards the Reformers. At one time the Christian woman had the sway. Francis resisted the Sorbonne. He promised to take from the Lutherans all he could, and to the utmost. He would give them, what has been called, the mass of seven points, or the suppression of seven abuses in the worship of the Romish church. At another time it was the Catholic or politic prince, who seemed to triumph. Marguérite de Valois bent before the stormy temper of her brother, shrouded herself in docility and silence, resumed even certain practices of Catholicism, and finally veiled her faith in such a manner that it is still a matter of dispute whether she died in the old or the new communion.

IV.

It appeared, in 1533, as if better days were about to dawn upon the French Reformation. The queen-mother, Louise de Savoie, who hoped to redeem by fanatic bigotry the libertinism of her youth, had just died. Francis I. had made an alliance with the Protestants of the League of Smalcald, and the credit of Marguérite de Valois had thence increased. She took advantage of the occasion to open the pulpits of Paris to Gérard Roussel, Courault, and Bertault, who leaned towards the Reformed doctrines. The bishop, Jean du Bellay, offered no opposition. He was a man of great reading, and in his letters to Melancthon signed himself: yours cordially.

The churches were crowded. Noël Beda, and other doctors of the Sorbonne, tried to raise the people; but they were banished by the Parliament. At this, the rage of the monks grew boundless. They performed, at their college of Navarre, a representation in which Marguérite de Valois, reading the Bible while spinning, was suddenly changed into an infernal fury. The Sorbonnists condemned at the same time one of her books, entitled The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, where no mention was made either of saints, or of purgatory, or of any other redemption than that of Jesus Christ. A Cordelier declared in a public sermon, that Marguérite deserved to be inclosed in a sack and thrown into the river.

Such insolence was too great for the king’s endurance. He had the regents of the college of Navarre punished, and the censure of the Sorbonne disavowed by the university in a body. He even threatened to inflict upon the Cordelier the penalty with which the monk had menaced Marguérite de Valois; but she interceded for him, and the punishment was commuted.

This disposition of Francis did not last long. Having had an interview with Clement VII. at Marseilles, in the month of October, 1533, for the marriage of his son Henry with Catherine de Medici, the pope’s niece, and being desirous of an alliance with this pontiff for the conquest of the Milanese, the dream of his life, he returned to Paris with a mind bent against the heretics. Many Lutherans, or Sacramentarians, as they were then called, were cast into prison, and the three suspected preachers interdicted from preaching.