oth of these pernicious
tendencies the eloquent reformer of Geneva employed his pen in forcible
treatises, which were not without effect in checking their
inroads.[445]

[Sidenote: Margaret of Navarre at Bordeaux.]

It must be confessed that the Queen of Navarre herself gave no little
aid and comfort to the advocates of timid and irresolute counsels, by a
course singularly wanting in ingenuousness. This amiable princess knew
how to express herself with such ambiguity as to perplex both religious
parties and heartily satisfy neither the one side nor the other. She was
the avowed friend and correspondent of Melanchthon and Calvin. She was
believed to be in substantial agreement with the Protestants. Her views
of the fundamental doctrine of justification by faith and the paramount
authority of the Holy Scriptures were those for which many a Protestant
martyr had laid down his life. Even on the question of the Lord's
Supper, her opinions, if mystical and somewhat vague, were certainly far
removed from the dogmas of the Roman Church. She condemned, it is true,
the extreme to which the "Sacramentarians" went, but it was difficult to
see precisely wherein the modified mass she countenanced differed from
the reformed service. Certainly not a line in her correspondence with
Calvin points to any important difference of sentiment known by either
party to exist between them. What shall we say, then, on reading of such
language as she used in 1543, when addressing the Parliament of
Bordeaux? She had been deputed by her brother to represent him, and was,
consequently, received by the court, (on the twenty-fourth of May) with
honors scarcely, if at all, inferior to those that would have been
accorded to Francis had he presented himself in person. Her special
commission was to notify parliament of an expected attack by the
English, and to request that due preparation should be made to ward it
off. From this topic she passed to that of heresy, in respect to which
she expressed herself to this effect: "She exhorted and prayed the court
_to punish and burn the true heretics_, but to spare the innocent, and
have compassion upon the prisoners and captives."[446] If, as the
interesting minute of the queen's visit informs us, she next proceeded
to claim the immemorial right, as a daughter of France, to open the
prisons and liberate the inmates according to her good pleasure,[447] it
can scarcely be imagined that the assertion of the right at