Claude Baduel, an avowed Protestant. At Poitiers one of the professors of theology, Charles de Sainte Marthe, openly taught the new doctrines till, a persecution breaking out in 1537, he had to fly for his life. Protestantism was also rife at Loudun and Fontenay, and before long spread to Niort and La Rochelle. Poitou became th*e stronghold of French Protestantism. Other provinces to which it gained admission at an early date were Dauphiné, where Farel had preached in 1522, and the Vivarais, in which Annonay near the Rhone became an important centre.
As was natural, the water-ways of the great rivers helped to spread the movement. On the Loire there was hardly a town from Le Puy to Angers which it did not reach, while between Orleans and Tours it took a firm hold. It worked up the Sarthe to Le Mans and Alençon, and up the Allier to Moulins and Issoire. It penetrated the Limousin by the Vienne and La Marche by the Creuse. It made its way along the Seine from Rouen to Troyes and along the Yonne to Sens and Auxerre. From Lyons it travelled down the Rhone to Tournon, and up the Saône to Macon and Chalons. At Dijon, the old capital of the duchy of Burgundy, a Lutheran was executed in 1530, and soon afterwards a pastor was sent there from Geneva. Agen on the Garonne formed a connecting link between Bordeaux and Toulouse; Sainte Foy and Bergerac were reached by the Dordogne, and Villeneuve by the Lot. The preaching of Philibert Hamelin at Saintes has been described in a well-known passage by his fellow-Protestant Bernard Palissy; thence it spread up the Charente to Cognac and Angoulême.
This then was the result of the repressive policy which Francis I had carried out with more or less consistency for ten years. The outward manifestation of Protestantism was indeed kept under, though not without difficulty; but the work of propagandism went on in secret, until nearly the whole of France was covered with a network of posts which, insignificant enough at present, were ready at a favourable opportunity and with proper organisation to become active centres of a militant Protestantism. But a change was now impending in the government of France. At the end of January, 1547, Francis I was seized with a serious illness, which terminated fatally on the 31st of March. He was succeeded by his only surviving son, under the title of Henry II.
Henry's policy towards the Protestants from the first was far more uniformly rigorous than his father's. It was not biassed either by sympathy with humanism, or by the necessity of conciliating his Protestant allies. Moreover it was the one point of policy upon which all his advisers were agreed. Here the opposing influences of Montmorency and Guise united in a common aim. In the very first year of his reign a second criminal Court of the Parliament of Paris was
