A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 4 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 572 pages of information about A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 4.

A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 4 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 572 pages of information about A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 4.
of Munster, in Westphalia, and there renewed their attempt to found the kingdom of Israel, with community of property and polygamy.  As in 1525, they were promptly crushed by the German princes, Catholic and Protestant, of the neighborhood; but their rising had created some reverberation in France, and the Reformers had been suspected of an inclination to take part in it.  “It is said,” wrote the Chancellor de Granvelle, in January, 1535, to the ambassador of France at the court of Charles V., “that the number of the strayed from the faith in France, and the danger of utter confusion, are very great; the enterprise of the said strayed, about which you write to me, to set fire to the churches and pillage the Louvre, proves that they were in great force.  Please God the king may be able to apply a remedy!” [Papiers d’Etat du Cardinal de Granvelle, t. ii. p. 283.] The accusation was devoid of all foundation; but nothing is absurd in the eyes of party hatred and suspicion, and an incident, almost contemporaneous with the fresh insurrection of the Anabaptists, occurred to increase the king’s wrath, as well as the people’s, against the Reformers, and to rekindle the flames of persecution.  On the 24th of October, 1534, placards against the mass, transubstantiation, and the regimen as well as the faith of the Catholic church, were posted up during the night in the thoroughfares of Paris, and at Blois on the very chamberdoor of Francis I., whose first glance, when he got up in the morning, they caught.  They had been printed at Neufchatel, in Switzerland, where the influence of the refugee William Farel was strong, and their coarse violence of expression could not fail to excite the indignation of even the most indifferent Catholics.  In their fanatical blindness factions say only what satisfies their own passions, without considering moral propriety or the effect which will be produced by their words upon the feelings of their adversaries, who also have creeds and passions.  Francis I., equally shocked and irritated, determined to give the Catholic faith striking satisfaction, and Protestant audacity a bloody lesson.  On the 21st of January, 1535, a solemn procession issued from the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois.  John du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, held in his hands the holy sacrament, surrounded by the three sons of France and the Duke de Vendome, who were the dais-bearers; and the king walked behind, with a taper in his hand, between the Cardinals of Bourbon and Lorraine.  At each halting-place he handed his taper to the Cardinal of Lorraine, folded his hands, and humbly prostrating himself, implored divine mercy for his people.  After the procession was over, the king, who had remained to dine with John du Bellay, assembled in the great hall of the palace the heads of all the companies, and taking his place on a sort of throne which had been prepared for him, said, “Whatever progress may have already been made by the pest, the remedy is still easy if each
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A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 4 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.