To personal motives were added political considerations. Indulgence to the perpetrators of an act so insulting to the Roman Catholic religion might drive the pontiff, whose friendship was an essential requisite of success in Francis's ambitious projects, to become the fast friend of the emperor, his rival. Pope Clement the Seventh had been succeeded by Paul the Third. The alliance cemented by the marriage of the Duke of Orleans to Catharine de' Medici had been dissolved by the death of the bride's uncle. The favor of the new Pope must be conciliated. Under such circumstances, what were the sufferings of a few poor reformers, when weighed in the balance against the triple crown of his Holiness?
[Sidenote: Fruitless intercession of Margaret.]
Francis determined to return to Paris for the purpose of superintending in person a search for the culprits. It is true that the Queen of Navarre attempted to moderate his anger by suggesting that it was not unlikely that the placard, far from being composed by the "Lutherans," was the cunning device of their enemies, who thus sought to insure the ruin of the innocent. But the king appears not unreasonably to have rejected the suggestion as improbable; although, seven years later, Margaret reminded him of her surmise, and maintained that the sequel had strongly confirmed its accuracy.[339]
[Sidenote: Francis abolishes the art of printing.]
Far, indeed, from yielding to his sister's persuasions, Francis in his anger took a step which he would certainly have been glad himself, a few months later, to be able to forget, and of which his panegyrists have fruitlessly striven to obliterate the memory. On the thirteenth of January, 1535, after the lapse of nearly three months from the date of the publication of the placards--an interval that might surely be regarded as sufficiently long to permit his overheated passions to cool down--the king sent to the Parliament of Paris _an Edict absolutely prohibiting any exercise of the Art of Printing in France, on pain of the halter_! It was no secret from whom the ignoble suggestion had come. A year and a half earlier (on the seventh of June, 1533), the theologians of the Sorbonne had presented Francis an urgent petition, in view of the multiplication of heretical books, wherein they set forth the absolute necessity of suppressing forever by a severe law the pestilent art which had been the parent of so dangerous a progeny.[340] The king was now acting upon the advice of his ghostly counsellors!