stinguished families in France, and had entered the church not from
devotion, but in consequence of an immemorial custom which consigned to
the episcopal dignity or to a rich abbacy the youth whom an elder
brother debarred from entertaining the hope of succeeding to his
father's dignities and possessions. Few of them had ever seen their
dioceses save on some great festival; none possessed the literary or
theological training necessary to qualify them for coping with the
master-minds among the Protestants. Accordingly, each bishop had to come
to Poissy with one or more "theologians," doctors of the Sorbonne, to
whose better judgment and superior learning he was content to defer on
every disputed point. There was little probability that a body thus
constituted would consent to enter into a candid consideration of the
differences separating the Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds.[1184]

[Sidenote: Influence of the papal legate.]

[Sidenote: The despondent nuncio, Viterbo.]

But the single event said by an eye-witness and actor in these scenes
to have conduced more than any other to destroy all hope of agreement,
was the arrival at court of the papal legate, Ippolito D'Este, Cardinal
of Ferrara.[1185] Pope Pius IV. had long been watching the affairs of
France with deep solicitude. If his legates, Tournon and Lorraine, had
failed to alarm him by their reports of the progress of the "new
doctrines," he could not but be troubled by the accounts which came from
his nuncio in France, Sebastiano Gualtieri, Bishop of Viterbo.
Gualtieri, an experienced diplomatist, learned, eloquent--and not
wanting in cunning,[1186] if we may believe his successor in office--had
proved himself unequal to the duties of his present position, by giving
way to extreme despondency. In the gay capital of France he led a
wretched life, in constant dread of future disaster, and ceaselessly
uttering lugubrious prognostications. To the Pope he announced that
religious matters in France were desperate; everything was rushing to
ruin with ever-increasing velocity. The queen mother was unsound in the
faith, although, from motives of policy, she dissembled her true
sentiments. She favored a preacher, one Bouteiller, who was equally
unsound; and she refused to dismiss him when admonished of her error. He
begged the pontiff to recall him, so that he might not witness the
funeral obsequies of the unhappy kingdom.[1187]

[Sidenote: Anxiety of Pope Pius IV.]