the severest persecution he had to undergo was that he endured at the hands of his fellow-workmen. We all know how much this prevails in large factories and in trade unions among us: and it must have been incalculably worse at a time when the guilds were such close bodies that it was impossible to carry on a trade independently of them. Henry II., like his father, cared little about the new doctrines, so long as they were confined to the learned and the well-born: but when they spread among the lower classes, he determined to punish heresy as worse than treason. His father’s edicts were carried out with great severity; but they were so far from producing the desired effect, that the Reform spread more and more. In order to hasten its extirpation, a new edict was issued (19th November, 1549), in which, after complaining that the bishops and their suffragans proceeded too slowly and tenderly--a statement which it is hard to accept--Henry established special chambers of Parliament for the trial and punishment of heresy only. It was a kind of lay inquisition, of which all the judges in the realm, both civil and ecclesiastical, were members _ex officio_. These were the famous _chambres ardentes_, so called, says Mezeray, “because they burned without mercy every one they convicted.” But the new edict appears to have had as little effect as its predecessors, for in the following month of February the king by letters patent reproached the judges for want of zeal “in discharging their duty in this holy and laudable work, so acceptable to God.” Finally the sanguinary edict of Chateaubriant[48] was issued (27th June, 1551), by which all the old laws on heresy were revised and codified. In the preamble, after recounting the efforts of his father as well as his own to suppress heresy, Henry declared that “the error went on increasing day by day and hour by hour;” that it was “like the plague, so contagious that in many large cities it had infected the majority of the inhabitants, men and women of every station, and even the little children had sucked in the poison;” and that he saw no hope of amendment except by employing the severest measures “to overcome the willfulness and obstinacy of that wretched sect, and to purge and clear the kingdom of them.” The magistrates were, therefore, ordered to search unceasingly for heretics, and to make domiciliary visits in quest of forbidden books (among which the Latin Bible of Robert Stephens was included).[49] This edict made denunciation a trade by giving the informer one-third of the heretic’s confiscated property, and farther enacted that a person acquitted of heresy in any ordinary court of justice might be again tried before an ecclesiastical tribunal, and _vice versâ_, thus depriving the poor Reformer of all chance of escape. Every suspected person was required to possess a certificate of orthodoxy, and even intercession on behalf of convicted heretics was made penal. These severities--though they were called