likely to be any slackness in the execution of the Edicts. The earlier half of the year 1541 was a period of special distress for the French Reformers; and throughout the years 1540 to 1544 constant additions were made to the roll of their martyrs. It is chiefly of isolated cases that we hear, at most of three or four at a time; there were no autos-de-fe. The stress of persecution had compelled the Reformers to practise prudence and secrecy, but each fresh execution added strength to the cause. One martyr made many converts.
The Peace of Crépy, September 18, 1544, with its vague provisions for the reunion of religion, and "for the prevention of the extreme danger" which threatened it, boded evil to the Reformers. The next year, 1545, memorable as the year in which the Council of Trent held its first sitting, is also memorable for an act which has left a dark stain on the history of France and the Church, the massacre of the Waldenses of Provence. In 1530 these peaceful followers of Peter Waldo, who dwelt in about thirty villages along the Durance, having heard of the religious doctrines that were being preached in Germany and Switzerland, sent two envoys to some of the leading Reformers to lay before them their own tenets, and to submit to them forty-seven questions on which they were desirous of instruction. They received long answers from Œcolampadius and Rucer, and in consequence held in September, 1532, a conference of their ministers at Angrogne in Piedmont, at which they drew up a confession of faith chiefly based on the replies of the two Reformers. They also agreed to contribute five hundred gold crowns to the printing of the new French translation of the Scriptures which was in contemplation. This affiliation of their sect to the Lutheran heresy naturally attracted the attention of the ecclesiastical authorities. Accordingly Jean de Roma, the Inquisitor of the Faith for Provence, who had already begun to exhort the Waldenses to abjure their heresy, set on foot a cruel persecution.
The unfortunate Waldenses appealed to the King, who sent commissioners to investigate the matter. Roma was condemned, but escaped punishment by flight to Avignon (1533); and the Waldenses, profiting by the comparative favour that was shown to the Reformers at this time, considerably increased in number. But in 1535 the Archbishop and Parliament of Aix renewed the persecution, and on November 18, 1540, the Parliament issued an order, afterwards known as the Arrêt de Mérindol, by which seventeen inhabitants of Merindol and the neighbourhood, who had been summoned before the bar of Parliament and had failed to appear, were sentenced to be burned. Owing however to the action of the First President the order was not put into immediate execution; and, the matter having come to the King's ears, he ordered Guillaume du Bellay, his Lieutenant-General in Piedmont, to make an enquiry into the character and religious opinions of the Waldenses. As the result of this enquiry the King granted a pardon to
