Controversial pamphlets.]

While the Protestants were thus demonstrating, by the fortitude with
which they encountered severe suffering and even death, the sincerity of
their convictions and the purity of their lives, their enemies were
unremitting in exertions to aggravate the odium in which they were held
by the people. An inquisitor and doctor of the Sorbonne, the notorious
De Mouchy, or Demochares, as he called himself, wrote a pamphlet to
prove them heretics by the decisions of the doctors. A bishop found the
signs of the true church in the _bells_ at the sound of which the
Catholics assembled, and marks of Antichrist in the _pistols_ and
_arquebuses_ whose discharge was said to be the signal for the gathering
of the heretics. A third controversialist went so far as to accuse the
Protestants not only of impurity, but of denying the divinity of Christ,
the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, and even the
existence of God.[651]

[Sidenote: Capture of Calais, January, 1558.]

Meanwhile, public affairs assumed a more encouraging aspect. Francis of
Guise, recalled from Italy, where his ill-success had been the salvation
of the poor Waldenses in their Alpine valleys,[652] had assumed command
of a large force, consisting partly of the troops he had taken to Italy,
partly of noblemen and gentlemen that flocked to his standard in answer
to the king's summons for the defence of the French capital. With this
army he succeeded in capturing, in the beginning of January, 1558, the
city of Calais, for two hundred years an English possession.[653] The
achievement was not a difficult one. The fortifications had been
suffered to go to ruin, and the small garrison was utterly insufficient
to resist the force unexpectedly sent against it.[654] But the success
raised still higher the pride of the Guises.

[Sidenote: Registry of the inquisition edict.]

[Sidenote: Antoine of Navarre, Conde, and other princes favor the
Reformation.]

The auspicious moment was seized by the Cardinal of Lorraine to induce
Henry, on the ninth of January, to hold in parliament a _lit de
justice_, and compel the court to register in his presence the obnoxious
edict of the previous year, establishing the _inquisition_.[655] But the
engine which had been esteemed both by Pope and king the only sure
means of repressing heresy, failed of its end. New churches arose; those
that previously existed rapidly grew.[656] The Reformation, also, n