An impartial historian should brave hostile prejudices, and assign her the place which is her due. Let us enter upon the French Reformation at the moment when, after great but isolated preparations, it is beginning to occupy a place in the affairs of the nation.[419] * * * * * The defeat at Pavia had plunged France into mourning. There was not a house where they did not weep for a son, a husband, or a father; and the whole kingdom was plunged in sorrow at seeing its king a prisoner. The recoil of this great disaster had not long to be waited for. ‘The gods chastise us: let us fall upon the christians,’ said the Romans of the first centuries; the persecuting spirit of Rome woke up in France. ‘It is our tenderness towards the Lutherans that has drawn upon us the vengeance of heaven,’ said the zealous catholics, who conceived the idea of appeasing heaven by hecatombs. The great news of Pavia which saddened all France was received in Spain with transports of joy. At the time when the battle was fought, the young emperor was in Castile, anxiously expecting news from Italy. On the 10th of March, 1525, he was discussing, in one of the halls of the palace at Madrid, the advantages of Francis I. and the critical situation of the imperial army.[420] ‘We shall conquer,’ Pescara had written to him, ‘or else we shall die.’ At this moment a courier from Lombardy appeared at the gate of the palace: he was introduced immediately. ‘Sire,’ said he, bending the knee before the emperor in the midst of his court, ‘the French army is annihilated, and the King of France in your Majesty’s hands.’ Charles, startled by the unexpected news, stood pale and motionless; it seemed as if the blood had stagnated in his veins. For some moments he did not utter a word, and all around him, affected like himself, looked at him in silence. At last the ambitious prince said slowly, as if speaking to himself: ‘The king of France is my prisoner.... I have won the battle.’ Then, without a word to any one, he entered his bed-room and fell on his knees before an image of the Virgin, to whom he gave thanks for the victory. He meditated before this image on the great exploits to which he now thought himself called. To become the master of Europe, to reestablish everywhere the tottering catholicism, to take Constantinople, and even to recover Jerusalem--such was the task which Charles prayed the Virgin to put him in a condition to carry through. If these ambitious projects had been realised, the revival of learning would have been compromised, the Reformation ruined, the new ideas rooted out, and the whole world would have bowed helplessly beneath two swords--that of the emperor first, and then that of the pope. At length Charles rose from his knees; he read the humble letters of the King of France, gave orders for processions to be made, and attended mass next day with every mark of the greatest devotion.[421]