effect that clerics alone should be liable to the inquisition, and
that the judges should be taken from amongst the clergy of France. For
all their passionate opposition to the Reformation, the Magistrates had
no idea of allowing either the kingship or France to fall beneath the
yoke of the papacy.

Amidst all these disagreements and distractions in the very heart of
Catholicism, the Reformation went on growing from day to day. In 1558,
Lorenzo, the Venetian ambassador, set down even then the number of the
Reformers at four hundred thousand. In 1559, at the death of Henry II.,
Claude Haton, a priest and contemporary chronicler on the Catholic side,
calculated that they were nearly a quarter of the population of France.
They held at Paris, in May, 1559, their first general synod; and eleven
fully established churches sent deputies to it. This synod drew up a
form of faith called the Gallican Confession, and likewise a form of
discipline. "The burgess-class, for a long while so indifferent to the
burnings that took place, were astounded at last at the constancy with
which the pile was mounted by all those men and all those women who had
nothing to do but to recant in order to save their lives. Some could not
persuade themselves that people so determined were not in the right;
others were moved with compassion. 'Their very hearts,' say
contemporaries, 'wept together with their eyes.'" It needed only an
opportunity to bring these feelings out. Some of the faithful one day in
the month of May, 1558, on the public walk in the Pre-aux-Clercs, began
to sing the psalms of Marot. Their singing had been forbidden by the
Parliament of Bordeaux, but the practice of singing those psalms had but
lately been so general that it could not be looked upon as peculiar to
heretics. All who happened to be there, suddenly animated by one and the
same feeling, joined in with the singers, as if to protest against the
punishments which were being repeated day after day. This manifestation
was renewed on the following days. The King of Navarre, Anthony de
Bourbon, Prince Louis de Conde, his brother, and many lords took part in
it together with a crowd, it is said, of five or six thousand persons.
It was not in the Pre-aux-Clercs only and by singing that this new state
of mind revealed itself amongst the highest classes as well as amongst
the populace. The Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, in her early youth,
"was as fond of a ball a