All historians agree that Marguerite d’Angouleme was a devout Catholic, but that she was too broad and liberal, intelligent and humane, to sanction the unbridled excesses of fanaticism.  The acknowledged leader of moral reform, she protected and assisted those persecuted on account of their religious views and sympathized with the first stages of that movement which revolted against abuses, vice, scandals, immorality, and intrigue.  With her, the question was not one of dogma, but concerned, instead, the religion which she considered most conducive to progress and reform.  It grieved her to see her religion defile itself by cruel and inhuman persecutions and tortures, by intolerance and injustice.  She felt for, but not with, the heretics in their errors.  “She typifies her age in all that is good and noble, in artistic aspirations, in literary ideals, in pure politics—­in short,—­in humanity; in her is not found the chaotic vagueness which so often breaks out in license and licentiousness, cruelty, and barbarism.”

During the absence in Spain of Francis I. and Marguerite, the mother-regent sought to gain the support and favor of Rome by ordering imprisonments, confiscations, and punishments of heretics; but upon the return of the king and his sister, the banished were recalled and tolerance again ruled.  When (in 1526) Berquin was seized and tried for heresy, he found but one defender.  Marguerite wrote to her brother, still at Madrid: 

“My desire to obey your commands was sufficiently strong without having it redoubled by the charity you have been pleased to show poor Berquin according to your promise; I feel that He for whom I believe him to have suffered will approve of the mercy which, for His honor, you have had upon His servant and your own.”

Marguerite had saved Berquin and had even taken him into her service.  Her letter to the constable, Anne de Montmorency, shows her esteem of men of genius and especially of Berquin: 

“I thank you for the pleasure you have afforded me in the matter of poor Berquin whom I esteem as much as if he were myself; and so you may say you have delivered me from prison, since I consider in that light the favor done me.”

When on June 1, 1528, a statue of the Virgin was thrown down and mutilated by unknown hands, a reversion of feeling arose immediately, and even Marguerite was not able to save poor Berquin, and he was burned at the stake.  Upon learning of his imminent peril, she wrote to Francis from Saint-Germain: 

“I, for the last time, very humbly make you a request; it is that you will be pleased to have pity upon poor Berquin, whom I know to be suffering for nothing other than loving the word of God and obeying yours.  You will be pleased, Monseigneur, so to act that it be not said that separation has made you forget your most humble and obedient sister and subject, Marguerite.”