this additional barbarity, which it was the custom to inflict on those who died impenitent. The congregation at Meaux was thus broken up, but the survivors carried the evangelical seeds to other towns in France.
The "Fourteen of Meaux " were not the only victims of the year 1546. Five others had already been burned at Paris, including the scholar and printer Etienne Dolet. Others were burned in the provinces. The next year, 1547, opened with fresh executions; and on January 14 the mutilation of a statue of the Virgin was expiated by a solemn procession at Paris.
Such was the policy which Francis I began definitely to adopt towards Protestantism after the affair of the placards, and which he put into active execution during the last seven years of his life. How far was it successful? As we have seen, it drove a large number of persons into exile; and these consisted chiefly of the better-born and better-educated among the Reformers. It intimidated many into outward conformity with the Church. It prevented all public exercise of the Reformed religion, and all open propaganda. Religious meetings were held by night or in cellars; doctrines were spread by secret house-to-house teaching, or by treatises concealed amongst the wares of pretended pedlars. On the other hand the frequent executions helped to spread the evil they were meant to repress. The firm courage with which the victims faced death did as much as the purity of their lives to convert others to their faith. Moreover, the influence of the exiles reacted on their old homes. From Geneva and the other Swiss centres of Protestantism missionaries came to evangelise France.
The result was that there was no longer a province in France, except Britanny, in which Protestantism had not acquired a foothold. In all the large towns it had been established at an early date. In Lyons, the most enlightened town of France, the Lutherans were already described in 1524 as "swarming." At Bordeaux, where the first seed had been sown by Farel, the preaching of a Franciscan, Thomas Illyricus, in 1526, had produced a rich harvest; and the revival in 1532 of the old College of Arts under the name of the College of Guyenne had done much to foster the movement. Rouen was deeply infected in 1531 and thence the contagion spread to other parts of Normandy and to Amiens in Picardy. Orleans became an important centre, partly through the influence of Melchior Wolmar, who lived there from 1528 to the end of 1530. Even at Toulouse, where the University had been founded as a bulwark of orthodoxy, and on the whole had fully maintained its reputation, the new doctrines could not be kept out, and in 1532 Jean de Caturce, a young licentiate of laws, was burned at the stake.
Other Universities contributed to the spread of Evangelical teaching; Poitiers, Angers, Bourges, and especially Nismes, the new foundation of Margaret of Navarre, the rector of which was the well-known humanist
