No one was more alarmed and more agitated than Margaret. Nothing was more opposed to her nature than the style of the placards; and in reality they were not only an attack against Rome, but a protest against the conciliatory catholic system of the Queen of Navarre. Those who protested in this way bore a certain resemblance (not reckoning their Christianity) to a well-known character in literature: they condemned alike the fanatic Romanists and the spiritual Catholics—
Les uns, parcequ'ils sont méchants et malfaisants,
Et les autres, pour être aux méchants complaisants.[232]
The queen had not the slightest suspicion of the blow that was preparing; and at the very moment when she believed the Gospel to be on the point of gaining the victory, everything seemed ended for it in France. Her brother's anger, the hard look he turned upon her, for perhaps the first time, alarmed this princess who had, it is true, a strong understanding, but also a heart easily moved and even timid. She shed floods of tears: she had no doubt that the whole affair was the result of a plot contrived between the Sorbonne and Cardinal de Tournon. 'My lord,' she said to the king, 'we are not sacramentarians. These infamous placards have been invented by men who wish to make the responsibility of their abominable manœuvre fall upon us.'[233]
She resolved to do everything to save Roussel at least; the very thought that he might be burnt terrified her. Why had she not left him at Pau? Seeing the unusual coldness of the king, she commissioned the perfidious Montmorency to present her petition. 'They are occupied at this moment,' she wrote to him, 'with completing their case against Master Gérard; I hope the king will find him deserving something better than the stake.... He has never held an opinion tainted with heresy. I have known him for five years, and if I had seen anything suspicious in him, I should not have put up so long with such poison. I entreat you, fear not to speak in my behalf.'[234]
Montmorency, far from being disposed to do what the queen asked, endeavoured to ruin not only Roussel, but also Margaret herself; while Cardinals Duprat and De Tournon helped him to insinuate into the king's mind that his sister had some share in the matter of the placards. The coldness, the harshness even of Francis I. towards Margaret, increased daily; heartbroken, and unable to bear up any longer, she left Paris hastily.
=BEDA ACCUSES FRANCIS.=
Some went further than Duprat and De Tournon, and would have made their vengeance fall upon the king himself. The impetuous Beda, that tribune of the Sorbonne, who forgot neither his exile nor his imprisonment, sought an opportunity of revenging himself on the prince who had disgraced him. He hated Francis cordially; to do him an injury for the mere pleasure of doing it was his ambition. Not satisfied with ascribing the placards to Queen Margaret, he would accuse the king himself. Going into the pulpit, he preached a sermon against that prince full of invective. 'If it is not the king who had these bills posted up,' he said, 'at least he is responsible for them. The favour he shows the heretics, and his alliance with the King of England, are the cause of all this mischief.' This time the priest was mistaken in fancying himself more powerful than the sovereign. Being accused before the parliament of high-treason,[235] Beda was thrown into prison, condemned to do penance in front of the church of Notre Dame, and to be confined for the rest of his days in the abbey of St. Michael, where he died. Thus perished in obscurity this furious forerunner of the League.
The revolutionary fury of the Romish champion softened Francis a little: finding himself accused as well as his sister, he recalled her to Paris. The queen, whose courage was as easily revived as it was cast down, arrived at the Louvre full of hope, not doubting that she would win over the king to the golden mean she loved so dearly. But she found Francis less accessible than she had fancied, and still showing signs of his ill-humour. But this did not stop her: imprudent and violent men had wished to abolish the mass by means of a fanatical placard, she will try to attain the same end by gentler and more prudent means. 'You want no church and no sacraments,' said the king to her, abruptly. The queen of Navarre replied that, on the contrary, she wanted both; and profiting by the opportunity for carrying out her plan, she represented to her brother that it was necessary to unite the whole of Christendom into one body with the bishop of Rome at its head; and that for this object, the priests should be brought to give up voluntarily certain scholastic doctrines and superstitious practices which stripped the ritual of the Church of its primitive beauty. Then, taking from her pocket a paper which Lefèvre had drawn up at her request, during her stay in the south, she presented it to the king: it was the confession of faith known as the Mass of Seven Points. 'The priest will continue to celebrate mass,' said Margaret to her brother, 'only it will always be a public communion; he will not uplift the host; it will not be adored; priests and people will communicate under both kinds; there will be no commemorations of the Virgin or of the Saints; the communion will be celebrated with ordinary bread; the priest, after breaking and eating, will distribute the remainder among the people. Further, priests will have liberty to marry.'[236] When Francis had heard the seven points of his sister's mass, he asked her what was left of the Roman mass? Then the queen, taking him on his weak side—glory—represented to him that by means of this compromise he would unite all sects, and restore the Catholic unity which had been broken for so many centuries. Was it not the greatest honour to which a prince could aspire?
=THE QUEEN'S PREACHERS BEFORE FRANCIS.=