And now the chiefs of both causes were in confinement: Gerard Roussel, Courault, and Berthaud on one side; Beda, Le Picard, and Le Clerq on the other. Would any one dare affirm that the King of France did not hold the balance even between the two schools? Who shall be released? who shall remain a prisoner? was now the question. It would have been better to set them all at large; but neither Francis nor his age had attained to religious liberty. Contrary winds agitated that prince, and drove him by turns towards Rome and towards Wittemberg. One or other of them, however, must prevail. Margaret, believing the time to be critical, displayed indefatigable activity. She pleaded the cause of her friends to the king and to his ministers. Still mistaken, or seeming to be mistaken, as regards Montmorency, she begged this treacherous friend to save the very persons whose destruction he had sworn. 'Dear nephew,' she wrote to him, 'they are just now completing the proceedings against Master Gerard, and I hope the king will find him worthy of something better than the stake, and that he has never held any opinion deserving such punishment, or savouring of heresy. I have known him these five years, and, believe me, if I had seen anything doubtful in him, I should not so long have put up with such a pagan.'[565] The king could not resist his sister's earnest solicitations and the desire of making friends among the protestants of Germany. In the month of March 1534 he published an ordinance vindicating the evangelical preachers from the calumnies of the theologians, and setting them at liberty.[566] Surprising thing! Roussel, Courault, and Berthaud at liberty; Beda, Le Picard, and Le Clerq in prison! The champions of heresy triumph, and the champions of the Church are in chains! And this, too, after the king's return from Marseilles (the interview at Bar-le-Duc was not known at Paris), and four months after the marriage of Henry of France with the pope's niece!... Where are the promises made to Clement VII.? Both the city and the Sorbonne were deeply excited by this measure.[567] The greater the hopes aroused by the union with the papacy, the greater the fears caused by the king's conduct towards its most intrepid defenders. Would Francis I. become a Henry VIII.? Would Roman catholicism be ruined in France? The priests were afraid—many of them even despaired. The evangelicals, on the contrary, were delighted. The Word of God was about to triumph, they thought, not only in Paris, but also throughout France. Surprising news indeed came from Lyons, where an invisible preacher kept the whole population in suspense. [Sidenote: ALEXANDER AT GENEVA.]