Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/118

Rh a Protestant plot to murder all good Catholics while at Mass. Nothing can be less founded than such a charge, obviously trumped up to secure a conviction. Without it the conviction was secure. Twenty-four of the accused were sentenced to be burnt to death.

On the 29th January 1535, a great expiatory procession traversed Paris from the Louvre to the Church of Nôtre Dame. The King walked in this procession, bare-headed, holding in his hand a lighted torch. He was followed by his children and the flower of his court. His beautiful mistress was there, with Queen Leonor and many fair and joyous ladies; but Margaret had returned to Navarre. She had left Paris, heavy-hearted, some weeks before, seeing, as it seemed, all her dreams of wide culture, beneficence, and toleration crumble suddenly into nothing, and the old reign of Darkness engulf the world once more. Indeed, on that morning of the 21st January 1535, the Renaissance, the College of France, the treaty with the Turks, appeared shocking and anomalous; for Paris had returned to mediævalism. It might have been Louis XI. and not King Francis who walked there bare-headed, holding his lighted torch. To the sound of solemn chants, the procession wound through the streets. Not only the court was there, and the King and Queen, and the two hundred gentlemen of the royal household, but the whole Sorbonne (triumphant over the absent Queen of Navarre), the Clergy of Paris, the Swiss Guards, the Heralds, the Court of Parliament, the Municipality, the Guilds of Capital, the Courts of the Realm. It was a procession of several thousand persons, all alike in their pity and their burning indignation, that marched from the