to an alliance
offensive and defensive, especially in matters concerning religion. He
assured them of the support not only of his own forces, but of his
father's troops, committed to him to use at his discretion, adding, as a
further motive, the prospect that the Gospel would find more ready
welcome in the rest of France, when the king saw its German advocates
close allies of his youngest son.[448]

[Sidenote: Commendable scepticism of the Germans.]

But the princes were much too familiar with the wiles of Francis to
repose any confidence in the lavish professions of his son. And the
historian who discovers that the more intimately the king strove to
associate himself with the German Protestants, the more fiercely did he
commit the Protestants of France to the flames, in order to demonstrate
to the Pope the immaculate orthodoxy of his religious belief, will not
fail to applaud their discernment. Not until toward the very close of
Francis's reign, when the Lutherans descried portents of a storm that
threatened them with utter extermination, raised by the bigotry or craft
of Charles the Fifth, did they manifest any anxiety to enter into near
connection with the French monarch.

Francis was reaping the natural rewards of a crooked policy, dictated by
no strong convictions of truth or duty, but shaped according to the
narrow suggestions of an unworthy ambition. If he punished heretics at
home, it was partly to secure on his side the common sentiment of the
Roman Catholic world, partly because the enemies of the Reformation had
persuaded him that the change of religion necessarily involved the
subversion of established order and of royal authority. If he made
overtures to the Protestant princes of Germany, the flimsy veil of
devotion to their interests was too transparent to conceal the total
want of concern for anything beyond his own personal aggrandizement.

Two mournful exemplifications of the fruits of his persecuting measures
must, however, be presented to the reader's notice, before the curtain
can be permitted to fall over the scene on which this monarch played his
part. The massacre of Merindol and Cabrieres and the execution of the
"Fourteen of Meaux" are the melancholy events that mark the close of a
reign opening, a generation earlier, so auspiciously.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 387: The Protestants might be pardoned, under the
circumstances, if their language was somewhat bitter respecting both
emperor and ki