[220] Valeran Poulain, brother-in-law of Hooper, whose sister he espoused at Zurich. He became this same year minister of the congregation cf Foreign Protestants at Glastonbury, near London. We shall find him afterwards minister of the Church of Frankfort.
[221] John Hooper, formerly chaplain to the Duke of Somerset, withdrew to Zurich during the latter years of the reign of Henry VIII. He was at this time disposed to return to England.
[222] Ambroise Blaurer, formerly minister of the Reformed Church of Constance, at this time minister of the Church of Bienne.
[223] This undated fragment should, we think, be referred to the month of February 1549; that is, to the period at which Bucer, compelled to leave Strasbourg, by the establishment of the Interim in that town, was making preparations for his departure for England. In one of his letters to Calvin we discover the following passage:—"We are only hindered by the tears and sighs of the pious—of whom there are still a great many here—from leaving this place before we get orders. For, if the Lord will, we wish rather to seal than to break up our ministry. You see how our affairs stand, and how much we need the assistance of your prayers, both in our own behalf and on that of this very unfortunate Church."—Calv. Opera, b. ix. p. 233.
Sadly disappointed in the dream of his whole life—the union of the Reformed Churches of Germany and Switzerland—forgotten by parties who could not forgive his moderation in an age of hatred and intolerance, Bucer carried with him into exile the respect and affection of Calvin, who in a letter, of which we have here only a mere fragment, addressed to him the highest consolations of Christian philosophy.
[224] While Calvin was engaged in active negotiations with the ministers of Zurich for the adoption of a common formula regarding the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, he addressed to the ministers of the Church of Berne a statement of what the Church of Geneva held on that important question, in the hope of leading that Church into the proposed union. But the Bernese clergy, placed in a position of absolute dependence on the seigneury, could not adopt any formula without its authority; and the seigneurs, jealous of their influence, regarded with a distrustful eye any communication with the ministers of Geneva. The approaches of Calvin, also, were not well received, and the noble desire of the Reformer for the union of the Helvetian churches, realized at a later period by Bullinger, met with no response.—Ruchat, tom. v. pp. 578, 579.
[225] A peculiar interest attaches to this and the following letter, written under a load of great domestic affliction. Early in April 1549, Calvin lost the worthy partner of his life, Idelette de Bure, whose frail and delicate health gave way under the pressure of a protracted illness, and whose last hours are known to us by the touching picture given of them by the Reformer. The consolations of friendship, and the consideration of the important duties he had to discharge, supported Calvin in this affliction, and the self-control which he manifested during the first days of his bereavement, excited the admiration of his friends. Viret wrote him on this occasion as follows: "Wonderfully and incredibly have I been refreshed, not by empty rumours alone, but especially by numerous messengers who have informed me how you, with a heart so broken and lacerated, have attended to all your duties even better than hitherto ... and that, above all, at a time when grief so fresh, and on that account all the more severe, might have prostrated your mind. Go on then as you have begun ... and I pray God most earnestly that you may be enabled to do so, and that you may receive daily greater comfort and be strengthened more and more."—Letter of 10th April 1549. Calv. Opera, tom. ix. p. 53
[226] Idelette de Bure had, by her first marriage with Jean Storder, several children known to us only by the pious solicitude of their mother on her deathbed.
[227] We read in Viret's letter to Calvin already referred to,—"My wife salutes you most courteously; she has been grieved in no ordinary way by the death of her very dear sister, and she and I feel it to be a loss to us all." Idelette de Bure kept up with Viret's wife a pious epistolary correspondence, which has unfortunately not been preserved.
[228] The minister Francis Bourgouin.