Francis was at the time of his death in his fifty-third year and had reigned for nearly thirty-three years. As before pointed out, no other monarch of Europe had done so much for scholarly literature. In Italy, valuable co-operation was given by certain of the princes and individual noblemen, while in Germany, the earlier printer-publishers were dependent rather upon the scholarly men of the middle classes and upon wealthy towns-people than upon princes or nobles. The same year, 1547, saw the death of Henry VIII. (who will in our memories always be associated with Francis on account of the famous meeting on the Field of the Cloth of Gold), of Vatablus, the learned Paris professor of Greek, and of Beatus Rhenanus, scholar, humanist, and friend of Erasmus and Froben. Luther, whose life-work had, in addition to the great results usually connected with it, exercised such a wide-spread influence on the production and distribution of literature, had passed away the year preceding. Du Verdier (himself a Catholic) expresses the opinion “that the Lutheran heresy, and the controversies to which it gave rise, conspired greatly to the development of literature.” The advocates of the Reformation showed themselves to be persons of great intellectual ability and profound research in sacred and classical literature, of which they made in their writings a great use. The severe ridicule that they brought upon the ignorance and barbarism of their opponents finally aroused the Catholic doctors to similar scholarly researches, and to call in the aid of erudition, which they had previously imagined to be some species of heresy.[16]