and of whole communities, and not merely from the personal ambitions and interests which soon come and mingle with them, whether it be to promote or to retard them.  One thing has been already here stated and confirmed by facts; it was specially in France that the Reformation had this truly religious and sincere character; very far from supporting or tolerating it, the sovereign and public authorities opposed it from its very birth; under Francis I. it had met with no real defenders but its martyrs; and it was still the same under Henry II.  During the reign of Francis I., within a space of twenty-three years, there had been eighty-one capital executions for heresy; during that of Henry II., twelve years, there were ninety-seven for the same cause, and at one of these executions Henry II. was present in person, on the space in front of Notre-Dame:  a spectacle which Francis I. had always refused to see.  In 1551, 1557, and 1559, Henry II., by three royal edicts, kept up and added to all the prohibitions and penalties in force against the Reformers.  In 1550, the massacre of the Vaudians was still in such lively and odious remembrance that a noble lady of Provence, Madame de Cental, did not hesitate to present a complaint, in the name of her despoiled, proscribed, and murdered vassals, against the Cardinal de Tournon, the Count de Grignan, and the Premier President Maynier d’Oppede, as having abused, for the purpose of getting authority for this massacre, the religious feelings of the king, who on his death-bed had testified his remorse for it.  “This cause,” says De Thou, “was pleaded with much warmth, and occupied fifty audiences, with a large concourse of people, but the judgment took all the world by surprise.  Guerin alone, advocate-general in 1545, having no support at court, was condemned to death, and was scape-goat for all the rest.  D’Oppede defended himself with fanatical pride, saying that he only executed the king’s orders, like Saul, whom God commanded to exterminate the Amalekites.  He had the Duke of Guise to protect him; and he was sent back to discharge the duties of his office.  Such was the prejudice of the Parliament of Paris against the Reformers that it interdicted the hedge-schools (ecoles buissonnieres), schools which the Protestants held out in the country to escape from the jurisdiction of the precentor of Notre-Dame de Paris, who had the sole supervision of primary schools.  Hence comes the proverb, to play truant (faire l’ecole buissonniere—­to go to hedge school).  All the resources of French civil jurisdiction appeared to be insufficient against the Reformers.  Henry II. asked the pope for a bull, transplanting into France the Spanish Inquisition, the only real means of extirpating the root of the errors.”  It was the characteristic of this Inquisition, that it was completely in the hands of the clergy, and that its arm was long enough to reach the lay and the clerical indifferently.  Pope Paul IV. readily gave the king, in April, 1557,