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 all the stronger because it sprang as much from a national as from a religious feeling. Ever since the days of Philip the Fair France had maintained an independent attitude towards the Papacy. During the Avignon Captivity the Popes had been her obedient servants. At the Council of Constance it was two Frenchmen, Jean Gerson and Pierre d'Ailly, who were chiefly instrumental in bringing about the declaration that Councils are superior to Popes. The Pragmatic Sanction (1438), as has been related in the first volume, gave definite shape to the liberties of the Gallican Church, and, though during the reigns of Louis XI and Charles VIII it was more or less in abeyance, the position of the French Church towards the Papacy remained practically unaltered. Louis XII formally restored the Pragmatic; and in his contest with Pope Julius II skilfully made use of the popular poet, Pierre Gringore, to influence public opinion. In his famous tetralogy of Le Jeu du Prince des Sots et Mère Sotte, played at Paris on Shrove-Tuesday, 1511, the Pope was held up to open ridicule. Thus in France there were no motives of personal interest at work to make a revolt from Rome desirable. The effect of the Concordat, the substitution of which for the Pragmatic (1516) was the only reform that the Fifth Lateran Council gave to France, was to put the French Church under the authority, not of the Pope, but of the King.

But the change in the method of appointing Bishops and Abbots from canonical election to nomination by the Crown, which was the chief feature of the Concordat, while it put an end to the noisier forms of scandal in the elections, greatly increased what many regarded as the root of the whole evil, the non-residence and worldly character of the superior clergy. For Francis I found that the patronage of some six hundred bishoprics and abbeys furnished him with a convenient and inexpensive method of providing for his diplomatic service, and of rewarding literary merit. A large number of abbeys were held by laymen, and even Bishops were not always in orders; pluralism in an aggravated form was common; the case of Cardinal Jean of Lorraine has been noticed in an earlier chapter; his brother Cardinal, Jean du Bellay, at one time enjoyed the revenues of five sees and fourteen abbeys. Italians shared largely in the royal patronage, and in 1560 it was estimated that they held one-third of all the benefices in the kingdom. It was this new method of patronage which more than anything paralysed all attempts at reform. It was idle to talk of reform at the bottom when at the top every personal interest was bound up with the existing corruption.

An impulse to reform was clearly needed from without. This was furnished by the Renaissance. For it was inevitable that the spirit of free enquiry, which was the main characteristic of that movement, should also invade the domain of religious dogma and Church institutions, and that, penetrating here as elsewhere to the sources, it should apply itself