"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.