Note 127 — Chapter XI · THE REFORMATION, POLITICALLY CONSIDERED

After various vacillations, the king in 1534 had the fresh pretext of Protestant outrage—the affixing of an anti-Catholic placard in all of the principal thoroughfares of Paris, and to the door of the king’s own room127—for permitting a fresh persecution after he had refused the Pope’s request that he should join in a general extermination of heresy,128 and there began at Paris a series of human sacrifices. It will have been observed that Protestant outrages had provoked previous executions; and there is some ground for the view that, but for the new and exasperating outrage of 1534, the efforts which were being officially made for a modus vivendi might have met with success.129 This hope was now frustrated. In November, 1534, seven men were condemned to be burned alive, one of them for printing Lutheran books. In December others followed; and in January, 1535, on the occasion of a royal procession “to appease the wrath of God,” six Lutherans (by one account, three by another) were burned alive by slow fires, one of the victims being a school-mistress.130 It was on this occasion that the king, in a public speech, declared: “Were one of my arms infected with this poison, I would cut it off. Were my own children tainted, I should immolate them.”131