The first of these was the party of Meaux, the leaders of which submitted to the government and went their own isolated way.
Then there was a party of Erasmian reform, mainly intellectual but profoundly Christian.

Its leader, William Bude, felt, as did Erasmus, that it was possible to unite the classical culture of the Renaissance with a purified Catholicism.

Attached to the church, and equally repelled by some of the dogmas and by the apparent {194} social effects of the Reformation, Bude, who had spoken well of Luther in 1519, repudiated him in 1521.
[Sidenote: Humanists] Finally there was the party of the "Libertines" or free-thinkers, the representatives of the Renaissance pure and simple.

Revolutionaries in their own way, consciously rebels against the older culture of the Middle Ages, though prepared to canvass the new religion and to toy with it, even to use it as an ally against common enemies, the interest of these men was fundamentally too different from that of the Reformers to enable them to stand long on the same platform.

There was Clement Marot, [Sidenote: Marot] a charming but rather aimless poet, a protege of Margaret and the ornament of a frivolous court.