of you, devoured by the same zeal as I, will forget the claims of flesh and blood to remember only that he is a Christian, and will denounce without pity all those whom he knows to be partisans or favorers of heresy.  As for me, if my arm were gangrened, I would have it cut off though it were my right arm, and if my sons who hear me were such wretches as to fall into such execrable and accursed opinions, I would be willing to give them up to make a sacrifice of them to God.”  On the 29th of January there was published an edict which sentenced concealers of heretics, “Lutheran or other,” to the same penalties as the said heretics, unless they denounced their guests to justice; and a quarter of the property to be confiscated was secured to the denouncers.  Fifteen days previously Francis I. had signed a decree still stranger for a king who was a protector of letters; he ordered the abolition of printing, that means of propagating heresies, and “forbade the printing of any book on pain of the halter.”  Six weeks later, however, on the 26th of February, he became ashamed of such an act, and suspended its execution indefinitely.  Punishments in abundance preceded and accompanied the edicts; from the 10th of November, 1534, to the 3d of May, 1535, twenty-four heretics were burned alive in Paris, without counting many who were sentenced to less cruel penalties.  The procedure had been made more rapid; the police commissioner of the Chatelet dealt with cases summarily, and the Parliament confirmed.  The victims had at first been strangled before they were burned; they were now burned alive, after the fashion of the Spanish Inquisition.  The convicts were suspended by iron chains to beams which alternately “hoisted” and “lowered” them over the flames until the executioner cut the cord to let the sufferer fall.  The evidence was burned together with the convicts; it was undesirable that the Reformers should be able to make a certified collection of their martyrs’ acts and deeds.

After a detailed and almost complacent enumeration of all these executions, we find in the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris this paragraph:  “The rumor was, in June, 1535, that Pope Paul III., being advertised of the execrable and horrible justice which the king was doing upon the Lutherans in his kingdom, did send word to the King of France that he was advertised of it, and that he was quite willing to suppose that he did it in good part, as he still made use of the beautiful title he had to be called the Most Christian king; nevertheless, God the Creator, when he was in this world, made more use of mercy than of rigorous justice, which should never be used rigorously; and that it was a cruel death to burn a man alive because he might have to some extent renounced the faith and the law.  Wherefore the pope did pray and request the king, by his letters, to be pleased to mitigate the fury and rigor of his justice by granting grace and pardon.  The king, wishing to follow the pope’s wishes, according as he had sent him word by his letters patent, sent word to the court of Parliament not to proceed any more with such rigor as they had shown heretofore.  For this cause were there no more rigorous proceedings on the part of justice.” [Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, p. 456.]