No sooner was the panic over and the Guises once more felt secure, than the religious persecutions were renewed with all their former severity. The old edicts against the Christaudins or Sacramentarians were revived, and commissions were appointed to receive secret evidence. To make the persecution more effectual, the Cardinal of Lorraine tried once more to introduce all the forms of the Inquisition without the name, and obtained a resolution of the royal council entrusting the entire cognizance of heresy to the prelates of the Church, and ordering that their sentence should be final, the heretics being handed over to the secular arm for punishment. L’Hopital, the new chancellor, resisted the encroachment on the broad grounds that the right of trial and punishment of _all offenses_--whether against person, property, or religion (except in the case of ecclesiastics)--lay with the king; that the right of appeal to the royal tribunals could not be taken away; and that the judgment on those appeals should be delivered by lay judges. He succeeded thus far in establishing the axiom, that “no power in the state possessed sovereign authority of life or death over the subjects of such state, except the king.” But he was compelled to yield in other points, and being of opinion that it is politic to permit a small mischief to escape a greater, he gave an unwilling consent to the edict of Romorantin (May, 1560), which declared that the cognizance of heresy should remain with the bishops, who were to proceed in the usual manner. This was a great sacrifice to intolerance, but it really gave the bishops no new power. Other clauses declared all persons attending conventicles guilty of high treason, and assigned a reward of 500 crowns to informers; to which the singular provision was appended, that all calumnious informers should be subjected to the _peine du talion_, in other words, suffer the punishment to which their victims were liable. To a certain extent this edict recognized the complaints of the Reformers by ordering the bishops to reside in their dioceses, and the parish priests to tend their flocks more carefully, teach them properly, and live among them. The new chancellor might well be proud of his work, the first hesitating step in the path of toleration. The Parliament of Paris refused to register the decree on the ground that it encroached on the civil power, and L’Hopital had to struggle for ten days before he could overcome their resistance. The fear of a repetition of the “tumult of Amboise” had frightened the Cardinal of Lorraine into accepting the edict; but his brother Francis bluntly declared he would never draw the sword in its defense. This was quite in his style, for he hated the Reformed not only because they were rebels against the Church, but because they were attached to the Bourbon princes. Navarre, indeed, was not very formidable, it being always possible to hold him in check by playing upon his selfishness;