CHAPTER XXX.——­FRANCIS I. AND THE REFORMATION.

Nearly half a century before the Reformation made any noise in France it had burst out with great force and had established its footing in Germany, Switzerland, and England.  John Huss and Jerome of Prague, both born in Bohemia, one in 1373 and the other in 1378, had been condemned as heretics and burned at Constance, one in 1415 and the other in 1416, by decree and in the presence of the council which had been there assembled.  But, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, Luther in Germany and Zwingle in Switzerland had taken in hand the work of the Reformation, and before half that century had rolled by they had made the foundations of their new church so strong that their powerful adversaries, with Charles V. at their head, felt obliged to treat with them and recognize their position in the European world, though all the while disputing their right.  In England, Henry VIII., under the influence of an unbridled passion, as all his passions were, for Anna Boleyn, had, in 1531, broken with the church of Rome, whose pope, Clement VII., refused very properly to pronounce him divorced from his wife Catherine of Aragon, and the king had proclaimed himself the spiritual head of the English church without meeting either amongst his clergy or in his kingdom with any effectual opposition.  Thus in these three important states of Western Europe the Reformers had succeeded, and the religious revolution was in process of accomplishment.

[Illustration:  The First Protestants——­178]

In France it was quite otherwise.  Not that, there too, there were not amongst Christians profound dissensions and ardent desires for religious reform.  We will dwell directly upon its explosion, its vicissitudes, and its characteristics.  But France did not contain, as Germany did, several distinct states, independent and pretty strong, though by no means equally so, which could offer to the different creeds a secure asylum, and could form one with another coalitions capable of resisting the head of that incohesive coalition which was called the empire of Germany.  In the sixteenth century, on the contrary, the unity of the French monarchy was established, and it was all, throughout its whole extent, subject to the same laws and the same master, as regarded the religious bodies as well as the body politic.  In this monarchy, however, there did not happen to be, at the date of the sixteenth century, a sovereign audacious enough and powerful enough to gratify his personal passions at the cost of embroiling himself, like Henry VIII., with the spiritual head of Christendom, and, from the mere desire for a change of wife, to change the regimen of the church in his dominions.  Francis I., on the contrary, had scarcely ascended the throne when, by abolishing the Pragmatic Sanction and signing the Concordat of 1516, he attached himself more closely to the papacy.  The nascent Reformation, then, did not meet in France with either of the two important circumstances, politically considered, which in Germany and in England rendered its first steps more easy and more secure.  It was in the cause of religious creeds alone, and by means of moral force alone, that she had to maintain the struggles in which she engaged.