On 23rd August 1535, John Calvin completed the famous preface to his first major religious treatise which he had decided to christen the Institution of the Christian Religion. Barely twenty-six years old, he was in a ‘quiet hiding place’ in exile at Basel. Not able to speak the language of the inhabitants, his friends were mainly among those who had taken flight from religious repression in France. Some, like Calvin himself, had been forced to retire hastily during the storm which had broken out in the wake of the ‘Day of Placards’ in Paris and other provincial cities during October 1534. Fearful of greater persecution to come and aware that his friends in France were already dead or imperilled, Calvin wrote in a tone of cold anger. The ‘fury of certain wicked persons’ was at large; through fraud, villainy and treason, they sought to exterminate the true religion from France by ‘prison, exile, proscription and fire’ on both land and sea.

It would be readily understandable if Calvin had dedicated the preface to a member of his family, to his humanist mentors, or even the memory of his close friends who had stayed and paid the price. Calvin directed it instead to the French king Francis I, whom he had never met (and would have disliked if he had), and who would have been unlikely to read it.