ther in 1416, by
decree and in the presence of the council which had been there assembled.
But, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, Luther in Germany and
Zwingle in Switzerland had taken in hand the work of the Reformation, and
before half that century had rolled by they had made the foundations of
their new church so strong that their powerful adversaries, with Charles
V. at their head, felt obliged to treat with them and recognize their
position in the European world, though all the while disputing their
right. In England, Henry VIII., under the influence of an unbridled
passion, as all his passions were, for Anna Boleyn, had, in 1531, broken
with the church of Rome, whose pope, Clement VII., refused very properly
to pronounce him divorced from his wife Catherine of Aragon, and the king
had proclaimed himself the spiritual head of the English church without
meeting either amongst his clergy or in his kingdom with any effectual
opposition. Thus in these three important states of Western Europe the
Reformers had succeeded, and the religious revolution was in process of
accomplishment.

[Illustration: The First Protestants----178]

In France it was quite otherwise. Not that, there too, there were not
amongst Christians profound dissensions and ardent desires for religious
reform. We will dwell directly upon its explosion, its vicissitudes, and
its characteristics. But France did not contain, as Germany did, several
distinct states, independent and pretty strong, though by no means
equally so, which could offer to the different creeds a secure asylum,
and could form one with another coalitions capable of resisting the head
of that incohesive coalition which was called the empire of Germany. In
the sixteenth century, on the contrary, the unity of the French monarchy
was established, and it was all, throughout its whole extent, subject to
the same laws and the same master, as regarded the religious bodies as
well as the body politic. In this monarchy, however, there did not
happen to be, at the date of the sixteenth century, a sovereign audacious
enough and powerful enough to gratify his personal passions at the cost
of embroiling himself, like Henry VIII., with the spiritual head of
Christendom, and, from the mere desire for a change of wife, to change
the regimen of the church in his dominions. Francis I., on the contrary,
had scarcely ascended the throne when, by abolishing the Pragmatic
Sanction and s