The defeat at Pavia and the captivity of Francis I. at Madrid placed the governing power for thirteen months in the hands of the most powerful foes of the Reformation, the regent Louise of Savoy and the chancellor Duprat.  They used it unsparingly, with the harsh indifference of politicians who will have, at any price, peace within their dominions and submission to authority.  It was under their regimen that there took place the first martyrdom decreed and executed in France upon a partisan of the Reformation for an act of aggression and offence against the Catholic church.  John Leclerc, a wool-carder at Meaux, seeing a bull of indulgences affixed to the door of Meaux cathedral, had torn it down, and substituted for it a placard in which the pope was described as Antichrist.  Having been arrested on the spot, he was, by decree of the Parliament of Paris, whipped publicly, three days consecutively, and branded on the forehead by the hangman in the presence of his mother, who cried, “Jesus Christ forever!” He was banished, and retired in July, 1525, to Metz; and there he was working at his trade when he heard that a solemn procession was to take place, next day, in the environs of the town.  In his blind zeal he went and broke down the images at the feet of which the Catholics were to have burned incense.  Being arrested on his return to the town, he, far from disavowing the deed, acknowledged it and gloried in it.  He was sentenced to a horrible punishment; his right hand was cut off, his nose was torn out, pincers were applied to his arms, his nipples were plucked out, his head was confined in two circlets of red-hot iron, and, whilst he was still chanting, in a loud voice, this versicle from the cxvth Psalm,—­

               “Their idols are silver and gold,
               The work of men’s hands.”

his bleeding and mutilated body was thrown upon the blazing fagots.  He had a younger brother, Peter Leclerc, a simple wool-carder like himself, who remained at Meaux, devoted to the same faith and the same cause.  “Great clerc,” says a contemporary chronicler, playing upon his name, “who knew no language but that which he had learned from his nurse, but who, being thoroughly grounded in the holy writings, besides the integrity of his life, was chosen by the weavers and became the first minister of the gospel seen in France.”  An old man of Meaux, named Stephen Mangin, offered his house, situated near the market-place, for holding regular meetings.  Forty or fifty of the faithful formed the nucleus of the little church which grew up.  Peter Leclerc preached and administered the sacraments in Stephen Mangin’s house so regularly that, twenty years after his brother John’s martyrdom, the meetings, composed partly of believers who flocked in from the neighboring villages, were from three to four hundred in number.  One day when they had celebrated the Lord’s Supper, the 8th of September, 1546, the house was surrounded, and nearly sixty persons,