them; for there was still a bad
seed of error and damnable doctrines--so wrote the king--growing and
multiplying from day to day. So exemplary a punishment must, therefore,
be inflicted, as might forever terrify offenders.[435] The king even
threatened delinquent prelates with seizure of their temporalities, in
case they failed to exercise due diligence in so important a
matter.[436]

[Sidenote: Audacity of the "Lutherans" of Bordeaux.]

[Sidenote: Francis I. and the Sacramentarians.]

King, bishops and parliaments were terribly in earnest. All were agreed
that Protestantism must and should be crushed, however little they
harmonized as to the reasons of its increase or the method of
suppressing it. The Archbishop of Bordeaux denounced to the parliament
of that city the growing audacity of the "Lutherans" of his diocese, who
had even dared to preach their doctrines publicly. He accounted for this
disorder by the fact that the prosecution and exemplary punishment of
heretics had ceased to be the uniform rule; as if the experience of the
past score of years had not demonstrated the futility of attempting to
compel religious uniformity by the fear of human tribunals and
ignominious death. He therefore begged the parliament to spare neither
him nor his brother prelates in the matter of defraying the expense of
bringing "Lutherans" to trial and death. The secular judges were of the
same mind with the prelates, and both took new courage from a
declaration of Francis himself, which the archbishop had recently heard
with his own ears at Angouleme. In the presence of Cardinal Tournon and
others, the king had assured him that "_he desired that no
sacramentarian should be permitted to abjure, but that all such heretics
should be remorselessly put to death_!"[437] By such pitiless measures
did Francis still think to establish his unimpeachable loyalty to the
doctrine of transubstantiation.

[Sidenote: Royal ordinance of Paris, July 23, 1543.]

But, as ill success continued to attend every attempt to crush the
Reformation in France, it was necessary to find some plausible
explanation of the failure. The ecclesiastical counsellors of the king
alleged that they discovered it in the recent edicts themselves, which
they represented as derogating from the efficiency of both prelates and
inquisitors of the faith. To meet this new objection, Francis
complaisantly published another ordinance (on the twenty-third of July,
1543), carefu