Meanwhile the University exercised its right of supervision. In 1534 Christian Wechel was censured and threatened with a fine for having sold one of the works of Erasmus. The same year, on the 13th of January, Francis I. issued letters patent which prohibited all printing and exposed printers to rigorous punishment. These letters were not registered by the Parliament, which remonstrated to the king concerning so arbitrary a proceeding. A month afterwards the king’s advocate, Jacques Cappel, communicated to the Parliament new letters patent, by which Francis I. annulled the previous ones, but ordered that the Parliament should elect twenty-four persons, well qualified and cautioned, from whom he might select twelve who alone should print at Paris, and not elsewhere, “books which were approved and essential to the public welfare.” The printing of any other books was to be visited with formidable punishments. The art of Gutenberg, however, resisted all these measures, and apparently the king did not persevere in his hostile projects, for in 1543 he exempted the printers from service in the City Guard. Two years later, nevertheless, Robert Étienne, having published an edition of the Bible which excited the wrath of the Sorbonne, found himself so persecuted that he had to retire to Lyons, whence he could not venture to return to Paris till he had obtained the protection of Henri II. A worse fate befell a Lyons printer, named Étienne Dolet, who had taken refuge in Paris. He was arrested, imprisoned in the Conciergerie, and at the end of eighteen months strangled and burned in the Place Maubert on the 3rd of August, 1546. In 1551 Robert Étienne, seriously menaced, was forced to seek refuge at Geneva, leaving at Paris his wife and children, who might have starved had not Henri II., on the prayer of Charles Étienne, Robert’s brother, restored to them the goods of the proscribed printer. This same monarch gave a further proof of his goodwill in exempting printers, by an edict of the 23rd of September, 1553, from the taxes to which books were then liable. In 1556 Henri decreed that a copy, printed on vellum, of every book whose publication was authorised, should be contributed to the Royal Library; and that every such copy should be magnificently bound. It is supposed to have been to Diana of Poitiers, a great bibliophile, that this decree was due. Charles IX. showed no little favour to printing. By letters patent, dated March, 1560, he confirmed and continued to the printers all those favours, rights, privileges, liberties, exemptions, and so forth, which had been ceded by his royal predecessors. One printer, however, Martin Lhomme by name, derived small benefit from these letters patent, for in the same year, on a decree of the Parliament, he was hanged.