From Rise of Protestantism in France to Publication of the Institutes - James Aitken Wylie

these associates, poisoned his diocese, and was
laboring to infect the whole of France; and unless
steps were immediately taken this pestilence would
spread over all the kingdom, and France would be
lost. Duprat and Beda were not the men to listen
with indifferent ears to these complaints.
The situation of the kingdom at that hour threw
great power into the hands of these men. The battle
of Pavia -- the Flodden of France -- had just been
fought. The flower of the French nobility had fallen
on that field, and among the slain was the
Chevalier Bayard, styled the Mirror of Chivalry.
The king was now the prisoner of Charles V. at
Madrid. Pending the captivity of Francis the
government was in the hands of his mother, Louisa
of Savoy. She was a woman of determined spirit,
dissolute life, and heart inflamed with her house's
hereditary enmity to the Gospel, as shown in its
persecution of the Waldensian confessors. She had
the bad distinction of opening in France that era of
licentious gallantry which has so long polluted both
the court and the kingdom, and which has proved
one of the most powerful obstacles to the spread of
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