Note 121 — Chapter XI · THE REFORMATION, POLITICALLY CONSIDERED

So determined had been the persecution that in 1526 Berquin was a second time imprisoned, and with difficulty saved from death by the written command of the captive king, sent on his sister’s appeal.121 And when the released king, to secure the deliverance of his hostage sons, felt bound to conciliate the Pope, and to secure funds had to conciliate the clergy, Marguerite, compelled to marry the king of Navarre, could do nothing more for Protestantism,122 being herself openly and furiously denounced by the Catholic clergy.123 Bought by a clerical subsidy, the king, on the occasion of a new outrage on a statue of the Virgin (1528),124 associated himself with the popular indignation; and when the audacious Berquin, despite the dissuasions of Erasmus, resumed his anti-Catholic polemic, and in particular undertook to prove that Béda, the chief of the Sorbonne, was not a Christian,125 he was re-arrested, tried, and condemned to be publicly branded and imprisoned for life. On his announcing an appeal to the absent king, and to the pope, a fresh sentence, this time of death, was hurriedly passed; and he was strangled and burned (1529) within two hours of the sentence,126 to the intense joy of the ecclesiastical multitude.