Beda did not stand alone. Le Picard had returned from exile with his master, and the Sorbonne, wishing to give him a striking mark of their esteem, had conferred on him the degree of doctor of divinity. Beda and Le Picard took counsel together with some other priests. War was resolved upon, the legions were mustered, the plan of the campaign drawn up, and the various battle-fields allotted among the combatants. They took possession of the pulpits from which the preachers of the Reform had been expelled, and loud voices were heard everywhere giving utterance to violent harangues against 'the Lutherans.' Beda, Le Picard, and their followers denounced the heretics as enemies of the altar and the throne. In the Gospel, the germ of every liberty, they saw the cause of every disorder. 'It is not enough to put the Lutheran evangelists in prison,' said these forerunners of the preachers of the League; 'we must go a step further, and burn them.'[556] The arrests were begun immediately; but early in the year 1534 the burning pile was declared to be the best answer to heresy. The parliament of Paris published an edict, according to which whoever was convicted of Lutheranism on the testimony of two witnesses, should be burnt forthwith.[557] That was the surest way: the dead never return. Beda immediately demanded that the decree should be applied to the four evangelists: Courault, Berthaud, Roussel, and one of their friends. Notwithstanding his moderation and his concessions, Roussel particularly excited the syndic's anger. Was he not Margaret's chaplain? The terror began to spread. Whilst Francis at Bar-le-Duc was endeavouring to please the most decided of the protestants, the evangelicals of Paris, alarmed by the inquiries of the police, shut themselves up in their humble dwellings. 'Really,' they said, 'this is not much unlike the Spanish inquisition.'[558] The Sorbonne dared not, however, burn Roussel and his friends without the consent of the king. [Sidenote: THREE HUNDRED EVANGELICAL PRISONERS.] In the meanwhile the ultramontane party formed the design of catching all the Lutherans in Paris in one cast of the net. Morin set to work: he urged on his hounds; his sergeants entered the houses, went down into the cellars and up into the garrets, taking away, here the husband from the wife; there, the father from the children; and in another place, the son from the mother. Some of these poor creatures hid themselves, others escaped by the roofs; but the chase was successful upon the whole. The alguazils of the Sorbonne lodged about _three hundred prisoners_ in the Conciergerie.[559] When this news spread, with its concomitants of terror and distress, the flight recommenced on a larger scale: some were stopped on the road, but many succeeded in crossing the frontier. Among their number was a christian courtier, Maurus Musæus, a gentleman of the king's chamber, who took refuge at Basle, whence he wrote describing his numerous perplexities to Bucer.[560]