We must now look at the other side of the picture. If the young flock of Meaux was peacefully feeding on the green pastures under the bishop's care, the monks, who cared little for the green pastures of the gospel, were losing their influence and their revenues, and the begging friars were returning home from their rounds with empty wallets. "These new teachers are heretics," said they; "and they attack the holiest of observances, and deny the most sacred mysteries." Then, growing bolder, the most incensed among them proceeded to the palace. On being admitted they said to the prelate, "Crush this heresy, or else the pestilence, which is already desolating the city of Meaux, will spread over the whole kingdom." Brissonnet was moved, and for a moment disturbed by the audacious monks, but did not give way. Yet admirable as were the piety and zeal of the bishop, he was of a timid and temporizing nature when danger assailed him. He lacked the firmness and constancy of spirit which enables some men, in days of persecution, to yield life rather than conscience and truth; and so he fell, yielding truth and conscience, and saving his life and liberty.
The monks, enraged at their unfavorable reception by the bishop, determined to lay their complaints before a higher tribunal. They hastened to Paris, and denounced the bishop before the Sorbonne and the parliament. "The city of Meaux," said they, "and all the neighborhood, are infected with heresy, and its polluted waters flow from the episcopal palace." Thus was the cry of heresy raised, and France soon heard the cry raised of persecution against the gospel. The notorious Syndic, Noel Beda, eagerly listened. War was his native element. Shortly before the accession of Francis to the throne, he had been elected the head of the Sorbonne; so that he felt bound to wage war against any assertion or dogma at variance with the philosophy of the schools, or the articles of the Romish faith. "He eagerly dissected the writings of the Reformers," says Miss Freer, "to drag forth their errors, and exhibit them in triumph to the hostile Sorbonnists. His fiery oratory raged against the study of the Greek and Hebrew languages; and Paris and the university rang again with the angry protests of the irascible Syndic. His expressions of fanatic joy at the prospect of the war he was about to wage, caused a thrill of horror to pervade the university. No one dare pronounce himself, when the cruel scrutiny of Beda might detect heresy, where none but himself even dreamed that it existed." Such was the man that the timid Brissonnet had to face, along with others of a like spirit. "In a single Beda," Erasmus used to say, "there are three thousand monks."
The defeat of Pavia, where the flower of the French nobility fell, and where the knightly monarch was made the prisoner of Charles V., and carried to Madrid, made Louisa, the king's mother, Regent of France. This augured badly for the Reformers; for she inherited the Savoy enmity to the gospel, and had become the leader of a licentious gallantry, which not only polluted the court of her son, but proved a great hindrance to the spread of the pure gospel.