ny in 1525, began again; the insurgents seized the town 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-be