If you think that I shall do well to undertake the journey, I am off." Melancthon had good reason to doubt whether success, such as he deemed necessary, were possible.

Whilst Francis I.was making all these advances to the Protestants of Germany, he was continuing to proceed against their brother Christians in France more bitterly and more flagrantly than ever.

Two recent events had very much envenomed party feeling between the French Catholics and Reformers, and the king had been very much compromised in this fresh crisis of the struggle.

In 1534 the lawless insurrection of Anabaptists and peasants, which had so violently agitated Germany 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.