It was the old Maison aux Piliers that had seen the dinner given to Queen Claude by the city fathers on the occasion of her entrance into Paris after Francis’s accession. Louis XII’s third queen, Mary, an English princess, was the first royal lady whom the city fathers had ventured to invite to partake of their hospitality. The occasion had not been entirely successful, for so great a throng pressed in to the city hall to observe the unusual guests that the waiters “hardly had room to bring the food upon the tables.” The arrangements for Queen Claude’s entertainment included precautions against such an invasion. When the great day came the provost of the Merchants and the lesser officials, clothed flamingly in red velvet and scarlet satin and followed by representatives of the guilds of drapers, grocers, goldsmiths, dyers, and so on, went to a suburb to meet their lady and act as her escort, and her majesty was graciously appreciative of all their attentions. While the Renaissance, humanism and the discovery of the New World were exciting men to new interests they also did their part in promoting independence of thought. With ability to read the Bible in the original came questioning of previous interpretations. There grew up both within and without the Church a desire to reform it, and with Calvin and Luther there came into expression not only a protest against the present state of affairs but a formulation of a new belief. Rabelais and Montaigne in their vastly different ways worked toward the same end. The movement proved to be one of those appeals which spread like a flame when the air touches it. Rich and poor, noble and simple responded to the plea, and Francis found himself the ruler of people ready to fly at each other’s throats and clamoring for him to let loose the dogs of persecution. Francis was a Catholic and condemned Protestantism in Francis, but in Germany he allied himself to the Protestant party against the emperor. Henry II (1547-1559), Francis’s son, did the same--and won some territory by the manoeuver--although he had strengthened his Catholic interests by marrying Catherine de Medicis, a niece of the Pope, and showed himself by no means friendly to the democratic ideas which the new religion fostered. His strength constantly was spent against the movement even to the end of his reign when he made an alliance for purposes of persecution with Philip II of Spain, husband of “Bloody Mary” of England. One of the first fruits of this union with the land of the Inquisition was the trial of a distinguished member of the Parliament, Anne du Bourg. Henry’s death merely interrupted the examination and du Bourg was burned on the Grève before the City Hall. The Paris Protestants or Huguenots lived chiefly in the Faubourg Saint Germain on the left bank.