Clement Marot had paid dearly for the privilege of being Margaret’s secretary; he was in prison, and consoled himself by composing his little poems. Margaret obtained his full release, and Marot hastened to his friends, exclaiming in a transport of joy:
In narrow cell without a cause,
Shut up in foul despite of laws
By wicked men, the king’s decree
In this New Year has set me free.[497]
Michael of Aranda, who, in 1524, had preached the Gospel with such power at Lyons, had been removed from Margaret, whose almoner he was. She sent for him and imparted to him her plan for introducing the Gospel into the Catholic Church of France, by renewing without destroying it. ‘I have procured your nomination to the bishopric of Trois-Châteaux in Dauphiny,’[498] she said. ‘Go, and evangelise your diocese.’ He accepted; the truth had already been scattered in Dauphiny by Farel and others. Did Aranda share Margaret’s views, or had ambition anything to do with his acceptance? It is hard to say.
A fourth victim of the persecution was soon saved. The young prebendary of Metz, the amiable Pierre Toussaint, was still in the frightful den into which the abbot of St. Antoine had thrust him. His host at Basle had not sent the books which the treacherous priest had constrained him to write for; no doubt the worthy citizen, knowing in whose hands his friend was lying, had foreseen the danger to which their receipt would expose him. Several evangelical christians of France, Switzerland, and Lorraine, particularly the merchant Vaugris, had successively interceded in his favour, but to no purpose. Finding all their exertions useless, they applied at last to Margaret, who warmly pleaded the cause of the young evangelist before the king. In July 1526, the order for his release arrived. The officers charged with this pleasing task descended to the gloomy dungeon selected by the abbot of St. Antoine, and rescued the lamb from the fangs of that wild beast. Toussaint, thin, weak, pale as a faded flower, came out slowly from his fearful den. His weakened eyes could hardly support the light of day, and he knew not where to go. At first he went to some old acquaintances; but they were all afraid of harbouring a heretic escaped from the scaffold. The young prebendary did not possess Berquin’s energy; he was one of those sensitive and delicate natures that need a support, and he found himself in the world, in the free air, almost as much alone as in his dungeon. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘God our heavenly Father, who has fixed bounds to the wrath of man which it cannot pass, has delivered me in a wonderful manner from the hands of the tyrants; but, alas! what will become of me? The world is mad and spurns the rising Gospel of Jesus Christ.’[499] A few timid but well-meaning friends said to him: ‘The Duchess of Alençon alone can protect you; there is no asylum for you but at her court. Make application to a princess who welcomes with so much generosity all the friends of learning and of the Gospel, and profit by your residence to investigate closely the wind that blows in those elevated regions.’ Toussaint did what they told him; he began his journey, and, despite his natural timidity, arrived at Paris, where we shall meet with him again.
More important deliverances still were in preparation. Strasburg was to rejoice. There was no city out of France where the king’s return had been hailed with so much enthusiasm. Many evangelical christians had sought refuge there from the cruelties of Duprat, and were sighing for the moment that would restore them to their country. Among the number of the refugees was the famous Cornelius Agrippa. His reputation was not unblemished; a book on the ‘Vanity of Science’ does him little credit; but he seems at this time to have been occupied with the Gospel. Having received a letter from the excellent Papillon, who told him how favourable the king appeared to the new light, Agrippa, who, surrounded by pious men, took their tone and tuned his voice in harmony with theirs, exclaimed: ‘All the Church of the saints with us, hearing of the triumphs of the Word at the court and in the most part of France, rejoiced with exceeding great joy.[500] I bless the Lord for the glory with which the Word is crowned among you. Would to God that we were permitted, as well as you, to return to France!’ Another country was equally attractive to this scholar: ‘Write to me what they are doing at Geneva ... tell me if the Word is loved there, and if they care for learning.’[501]
Men more decided than Cornelius Agrippa were to be found at Strasburg. During all the winter the hospitable house of Capito had often witnessed the meetings of those christians who had raised highest the standard of the Gospel in France. There assembled the aged Lefèvre, the first translator of the Bible, who had escaped the stake only by flight; the pious Roussel, Vedastes, Simon, and Farel who had arrived from Montbéliard. These friends of the Reformation concealed themselves under assumed names: Lefèvre passed as Anthony Peregrin; Roussel as Tolnin; but they were known by everybody, even by the children in the streets.[502] They often met Bucer, Zell, and the Count of Hohenlohe, and edified one another. Margaret undertook to bring them all back to France. The court was then in the south; the king was at Cognac, his birthplace, where he often resided; the duchesses (his mother and sister) at Angoulême. One day when they met, Margaret entreated her brother to put an end to the cruel exile of her friends: Francis granted everything.
What joy! the aged Lefèvre, the fervent Roussel, are recalled with honour, says Erasmus.[503] The Strasburgers embraced them with tears; the old man felt happy that he was going to die in the country where he was born. He immediately took the road to France in company with Roussel; others followed them; all believed that the new times were come. In their meetings the evangelicals called to mind these words of the prophet: The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.[504] Lefèvre and Roussel hastened to their protectress. Margaret received them kindly, lodged them in the castle of Angoulême, where she was born, on that smiling hill which she loved so much, near that ‘softly-flowing’ Charente, as she describes it. Lefèvre and Roussel had many precious conversations with her. They loved to speak of their life at Strasburg, of the new views they had found there, and of the brotherly communion they had enjoyed. ‘We were there,’ they said, ‘with William Farel, Michael of Aranda, Francis Lambert, John Vedastes, the Chevalier d’Esch, and many other evangelicals ... scattered members of a torn body, but one in Christ Jesus. We carefully put out of sight all that might interrupt the harmony between brethren; the peace that we tasted, far from being without savour, like that of the world, was perfumed with the sweet odour of God’s service.’
This meeting at Strasburg had borne fruit. The energetic Farel, the learned Lefèvre, the spiritual Roussel, gifted with such opposite natures, had reacted upon each other. Farel had become more gentle, Roussel more strong; contact with iron had given an unusual hardness to a metal by nature inclined to be soft. The sermons they heard, their frequent conversations, the trials of exile, and the consolation of the Spirit of God, had tempered the souls which had been not a little discouraged by persecution. Roussel had taken advantage of his leisure to study Hebrew, and the Word of God had acquired a sovereign importance in his eyes. Struck by the virtues of which the early christians had given an example, he had found that we must seek for the secret of their lives in the history of the primitive Church, in the inspired Scripture of God. ‘The purity of religion will never be restored,’ he used to say, ‘unless we drink at the springs which the Holy Ghost has given us.’[505]
It was not enough for the refugees to have returned; their christian activity must be employed to the advantage of France. At the beginning of June, Roussel went to Blois. Margaret wished to make this city—the favourite residence of the Valois, and notorious for the crimes perpetrated there in after years—a refuge for the persecuted, a caravanserai for the saints, a stronghold of the Gospel. On the 29th of June Lefèvre also went there.[506] The king intrusted him with the education of his third son and the care of the castle library. Chapelain, physician to the Duchess of Angoulême, and Cop, another doctor, of whom we shall see more hereafter, were also in that city; and all of them, filled with gratitude towards Francis I., were contriving the means of imparting ‘something of Christianity to the Most Christian King’[507]—which was, in truth, very necessary.
Thus things were advancing. It seemed as if learning and the Gospel had returned with the king from banishment. Macrin, whose name Zwingle placed side by side with that of Berquin, was set at liberty.[508] Cornelius Agrippa returned to Lyons. Sprung from an ancient family of Cologne, he had served seven years in the imperial army; he then became a great savant (and not a great magician, as was supposed), doctor of theology, law, and medicine. He published a book on Marriage and against celibacy, which excited much clamour. Agrippa was astonished at this, and not without reason. ‘What!’ he exclaimed, ‘the tales of Boccaccio, the jests of Poggio, the adulteries of Euryalus and Lucretia, the loves of Tristan and of Lancelot, are read greedily, even by young girls[509] ... and yet they cry out against my book on Marriage!’—This explains an incident in history: the youthful readers of Boccaccio became the famous ‘squadron’ of Catherine de’ Medici, by whose means that impure woman obtained so many victories over the lords of the court.