For a long time, I have heard that you who were once truly Christian, have become heretics and, in the manner of the Saracens, have abolished the true Faith and worship; that you have adopted an infectious and baleful superstition, and, bent on sustaining and expanding it, there is no infamy or cruelty that you dare not practise.
You disparage the Sacraments of the Church, truncate the articles of the Faith, demolish sacred edifices, break down and burn images made for the sacred celebrations, in short, you have massacred the Christians who do not accept your beliefs. What rage, madness or fury stirs you? You persecute, you strive to subvert and destroy the Faith, which God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit instituted, ennobled and magnified in a thousand ways, by a thousand miracles.
Blind are you, and not those who lack their sight and their eyes. Do you think that you will go unpunished? Do you not know that if God does not prevent your ungodly violence, if He allows you to remain longer in darkness and error it is because He prepares for you greater chastisements and torments?
I tell you the truth: were I not so busy fighting the English, I would have gone to meet you. But if I be not informed that you have amended, I will perhaps leave the English and advance against you, in order, there being no other solution, to eliminate by the sword your impetuous and vain superstition, taking from you either heresy or life.
Nevertheless, should you choose to return to the Catholic Faith and the primordial light, send me your ambassadors, through whom I shall tell you what to do. If, on the contrary, you choose to kick against the goad, remember your abominable crimes and await my arrival with all the divine and human forces to recompense you for all of the evil you have done to others.◊
Sully, March 23, 1530
