the bull he asked for, but the Parliament of Paris refused to enregister the royal edict which gave force in France to the pontifical brief.  In 1559 the pope replied to this refusal by a bull which comprised in one and the same anathema all heretics, though they might be kings or emperors, and declared them to have “forfeited their benefices, states, kingdoms, or empires, the which should devolve on the first to seize them, without power on the part of the Holy See itself to restore them.” [Magnum Bullarium Romanum, a Beato Leone Magno ad Paulum IV., t. i. p. 841:  Luxembourg, 1742.] The Parliament would not consent to enregister the decree unless there were put in it a condition to the effect that clerics alone should be liable to the inquisition, and that the judges should be taken from amongst the clergy of France.  For all their passionate opposition to the Reformation, the Magistrates had no idea of allowing either the kingship or France to fall beneath the yoke of the papacy.

Amidst all these disagreements and distractions in the very heart of Catholicism, the Reformation went on growing from day to day.  In 1558, Lorenzo, the Venetian ambassador, set down even then the number of the Reformers at four hundred thousand.  In 1559, at the death of Henry II., Claude Haton, a priest and contemporary chronicler on the Catholic side, calculated that they were nearly a quarter of the population of France.  They held at Paris, in May, 1559, their first general synod; and eleven fully established churches sent deputies to it.  This synod drew up a form of faith called the Gallican Confession, and likewise a form of discipline.  “The burgess-class, for a long while so indifferent to the burnings that took place, were astounded at last at the constancy with which the pile was mounted by all those men and all those women who had nothing to do but to recant in order to save their lives.  Some could not persuade themselves that people so determined were not in the right; others were moved with compassion.  ‘Their very hearts,’ say contemporaries, ‘wept together with their eyes.’” It needed only an opportunity to bring these feelings out.  Some of the faithful one day in the month of May, 1558, on the public walk in the Pre-aux-Clercs, began to sing the psalms of Marot.  Their singing had been forbidden by the Parliament of Bordeaux, but the practice of singing those psalms had but lately been so general that it could not be looked upon as peculiar to heretics.  All who happened to be there, suddenly animated by one and the same feeling, joined in with the singers, as if to protest against the punishments which were being repeated day after day.  This manifestation was renewed on the following days.  The King of Navarre, Anthony de Bourbon, Prince Louis de Conde, his brother, and many lords took part in it together with a crowd, it is said, of five or six thousand persons.  It was not in the Pre-aux-Clercs only and by singing that this new