Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/110

Rh looked to the New Ideas as an escape from the degrading laxities, the soulless unmeaning of sixteenth-century religion. They hoped for purification and reform in the Church itself; while the Patriots desired to see the restriction of the temporal power of Rome; both wished to decentralize the Church, to restore the Gallican branch to its old national position. All these different strains of dissent were, firmly welded into one by the ignorant persecution of the Sorbonne. But this movement was not yet Protestant; it was still very practical, very undefined; little concerned with theories or ideas. "Thank heaven," cries Margaret, "we are none of us Sacramentarians!" To establish secular education, print the Bible in French, teach Greek and Mathematics, sustain the Gallican branch, this is the programme of the movement; this, and no actual schism. Briçonnet, Roussel, the Du Bellays, Margaret, did not desire or dream of a Church wholly severed from the Catholic authority. It was a sort of Home Rule which they demanded: to be Catholics, but reformed and Gallican Catholics. It was in truth Calvin the Frenchman, Calvin the man of system and practice, and not Luther the German, the mystic and prophet, who organized and consolidated the Protestant Church.

This point must never be forgotten in seeking to understand the history of Margaret of Angoulême. That life, else so hopelessly confused, so vacillating and effortless, becomes clear and definite when once we understand that not the Reformation but the Renaissance inspired it. Never was a spirit less dogmatic or insistent than hers. She was no martyr, no saint or prophetess. She was merely a woman filled by the new fervour for learning, the new reverence