Fortunes of Gérard Roussel.
Gérard Roussel, the most distinguished representative of this class of mystics, was appointed by the Queen of Navarre to be her preacher and confessor, and promoted successively to be Abbot of Clairac and Bishop of Oléron. Yet he remained, to his death, a sincere friend of the Reformation. Occasionally, at least, he preached its doctrines with tolerable distinctness; as, for instance, in the Lenten discourses delivered by him, in conjunction with Courault and Bertault, before the French court in the Louvre (1532). In his writings he was still more outspoken. Some of them might have been written not only by a reformer, but by a disciple of Calvin, so sharply drawn were the doctrinal expositions.[208] Meanwhile, in his own diocese he set forth the example of a faithful pastor. Even so bitter an enemy of Protestantism as Florimond de Ræmond, contrasting Roussel's piety with the worldliness of the sporting French bishops of the period, is forced to admit that his pack of hounds was the crowd of poor men and women whom he daily fed, his horses and attendants a host of children whom he caused to be instructed in letters.[209]
And yet, Gérard Roussel's half measures, while failing to conciliate the adherents of the Roman church, alienated from him the sympathies of the reformers; for they saw in his conduct a weakness little short of entire apostasy. More modern Roman Catholic writers, for similar reasons, deny that Roussel was ever at heart a friend of the Reformation.[210] Not so, however, thought the fanatics of his own time. While the Bishop of Oléron was one day declaiming, in a church of his diocese, against the excessive multiplication of feasts, the pulpit in which he stood was suddenly overturned, and the preacher hurled with violence to the ground. The catastrophe was the premeditated act of a religious zealot, who had brought with him into the sacred place an axe concealed under his cloak. The fall proved fatal to Gérard Roussel, who is said to have expressed on his death-bed similar regrets to those which had disturbed the last hours of Lefèvre d'Étaples. As for the murderer, although arrested and tried by the Parliament of Bordeaux, he was in the end acquitted, on the ground that he had performed a meritorious act, or, at most, committed a venial offence, in ridding the world of so dangerous a heretic as the Bishop of Oléron.[211]
CHAPTER III.
FRANCIS I. AND MARGARET OF ANGOULEME—EARLY REFORMATORY MOVEMENTS AND STRUGGLES.
Francis I. and his sister.
The portrait of the king.
Francis the First and his sister, Margaret of Angoulême, were destined to exercise so important an influence in shaping the history of the French Reformation during the first half of the sixteenth century, that a glance at their personal history and character seems indispensable. Francis Was in his twenty-first year when, by the extinction of the elder line of the house of Orleans, the crown came to him as the nearest heir of Louis the Twelfth.[212] He was tall, but well proportioned, of a fair complexion, with a body capable of enduring without difficulty great exposure and fatigue. In an extant portrait, taken five years later, he is delineated with long hair and scanty beard. The drooping lids give to his eyes a languid expression, while the length of his nose, which earned him the sobriquet of "le roi au long nez," redeems his physiognomy from any approach to heaviness.[213] On the other hand, the Venetian Marino Cavalli, writing shortly before the close of his reign, eulogizes the personal appearance of Francis, at that time more than fifty years old. His mien was so right royal, we are assured, that even a foreigner, never having seen him before, would single him out from any company and instinctively exclaim, "This is the king!" No ruler of the day surpassed him in gravity and nobility of bearing. Well did he deserve to succeed that long line of monarchs upon each of whom the sacred oil, applied at his coronation in the cathedral of Rheims, had conferred the marvellous property of healing the king's-evil by a simple touch.[214]