and whose name is more solidly established as that of the father of letters, engaged in frequent war with all Europe, and particularly with his great rival Charles V, found it necessary by the force of political motives to temporize for the most part with the Reformers, who, therefore, though occasionally the objects of edicts and punishments designed to suppress the growing heresy gradually, in the course of his long reign, acquired great strength and importance from their numbers, ability, and even learning. The novelty had the same or greater success under his immediate successor Henry II, but was in some degree diminished by the power and influence of the great duke of Guise in the time of Francis II. The murder of this great duke by Poltrot, the agent of the Protestant party, freed all parties from the restraint which had hitherto confined them, and a civil war broke out which for length, bitterness, and desolation, has never been equalled; in which the balance of cruelty and slaughter, whether on one side or the other has never been, and never can be settled, and to envenom and embitter which all the ingredients of theological hatred, fear of tyranny, resistance to innovation, and disgust at ancient practices were combined with horror and aversion for adverse opinions and persons, with the frenzy of political partizanship and the extravagance of ignorance and superstition. It was in this then most unhappy country that in the next reign occurred that terrible and unspeakable massacre of St. Bartholomew by the Catholics, not to be accounted for except as an ebullition of universal madness, and perhaps not to be equalled in history, except by the atrocious slaughters of Dauphiné and Mornas by the Protestants; for the histories of these times, on each side, in revealing (what we might almost wish had never been known beyond their age) the horrors and hatred of each party, without shame, sometimes even with insane satisfaction, prove that neither side was more free from blame-was more Christian, or more generous than the other, and that of either the murder and cruelty were restrained only by the want of power.

The civil war-the result of the Refor

mation, was led on by Condé and Coligny on the one side, and the dukes of Guise on the other. Reconciliation seemed to be impossible, for it involved an abandonment of religious faith, and (what was then as insupportable) the toleration of another's, or of political connection to violate which was only to furnish the motives of another contest. The monarch himself was not the leader nor even the principal of his own party, which was connected, not by the sentiment of personal or even political loyalty, but by religion; and such terms as he granted to his adversaries, or such as he was compelled to receive from Condé and Coligny were subject to the pleasure and approbation of his followers and masters.

There

There were many good and wise men on each side in those days, as there are always in times of high excitement and disunion, and they were listened to as much as wise and just and liberal men are heard by crowds of bigots and madmen. There was the Admiral Coligny on the side of the Huguenots, a skilful, prudent leader, and brave soldier, who might have commanded the confidence of his adversaries, but that he was believed, and upon good reason, to have been the worst instigator of the murder of the great duke of Guise by Poltrot. was the famous Chancellor L'Hospital on the part of the actual government. Coligny maintained his power and influence in his party until his death, and does not appear ever to have yielded points which at this day would be regarded as trivial, and to compromise which might have brought about a pacification. The other L'Hospital, steadfast in his devotion to humanity rather than party, enacted and registered laws tending to harmony and peace, for which he was suspected and disowned by those whom he supported, and at last dismissed by the court.

Henry III succeeded Charles IX, in 1574. At that time the Huguenots amounted in numbers to about two millions, and formed perhaps a sixth of the population, a larger proportion than they preserved, and always too small to justify them in a political truce at least in their hope and attempt to change the national faith, and the

constitutional, religious, and political features of the kingdom. Their desire and object were that in all those towns where they formed a majority, the Catholic worship should be abolished, and in those where they were in a minority their own should be tolerated. By one of the first edicts of pacification, that of Henry III, granted to the Huguenots the liberty to build churches, and hold synods wherever they pleased, except within two leagues of the court. He enacted that of seven parliaments, among which were Paris, Toulouse and Grenoble, the one half of the members should be Catholics, and the other Protestants, and that the children of those who had suffered in the massacre of St. Bartholomew should be released from payment of taxes for six years. He gave to Condé the government of Picardy and Peronne-he allowed the Protestants to retain as cautionary of his good faith, certain fortified towns in Dauphiné and elsewhere, of which they were to nominate the governors, and he agreed that the states general should be assembled in six months for the redress of grievances.

Their own historian states that as soon as they had obtained this edict, the Huguenots regretted that they had not asked for more, and the Catholics then rose in anger against their exaggerated and importunate demands. The Parliament refused to register this edict except with certain conditions, and both parties again resorted to arms. The Catholics then formed the famous league of which the avowed motive was to protect religion, the king, and the liberty of the state. At the head of it was Henry II, great duke of Guise, and it numbered the principal gentlemen of France, but its multitude was composed of the people, and its character was essentially popular. It was eagerly embraced in Picardy and Peronne, which the king had given to the Protestants. It was extended throughout the kingdom as a chain that linked men rather to their religion than their government, and was perhaps the most honest and obstinate interest in the kingdom. During the dissentions of the league, says the historian of the Protestants, the Catholics and Huguenots fought with each other, murdered, deceived and

VOL. II.-No. 7.

poisoned each other, and agreed only in devastating the provinces where both happened to be.

At the death of Henry III, the two parties fought for a throne as well as for religion. Henry IV, was at the head of the Protestant array, and entitled in the order of descent to the crown. He had been born and bred a Protestant-had been reconciled to the Church in the time of Charles IX, and in the mutations of politics had abjured its faith. He was disliked by the great mass of the people as a Protestant, and in some sense as a stranger in birth. The Catholics set up the Cardinal de Bourbon, as Charles X, and in the course of the furious wars which followed, Henry again abjured Protestantism, doing this upon the advice of the wisest and most honest of his party, of Du Plessis Mornay for instance, and of Sully who told him, "It fits you to be a Catholic, and it fits me to be a Protestant, for the canon of the mass is the best cannon to conquer Paris." The ministers of his party sent a deputation to remonstrate with him, but one of them, who must be acknowledged to have been strangely liberal in those days, having admitted that a man might be saved in the Catholic faith, the king obtained an advantage over them, when he said, "In that case as a matter of prudence it is better I should be a Catholic than a Protestant, for both you and they agree that I might then be saved; but in your religion I have only your word and not your adversaries for my salvation."

He was then, on the 25th of July, 1593, again received into the Catholic Church, and large bodies of those, whose opposition had been prompted only by his religious affinities, withdrew upon this event from the contest. After some desperate battles with the army under the duke of Mayenne, now opposing him at the instigation of Spain, whose monarch's designs extended to an invasion of France, and the possession of her crown, he entered Paris and ascended the throne in 1593.

But his success did not at least immediately, either weaken the violence of his own party, or command the entire confidence of the Catholics, and after various

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favors granted or renewed by him in ease of the Protestants, the relief of whom scarcely soothed their violence, while it excited that of their rivals, he promulgated in August, 1598, his famous edict of Nantes, securing to the Protestants by law, the enjoyment of all the rights of a French subject, and absolving them from the consequences of their heresy and rebellion: this edict being the first manifestation which the world had yet seen of a spirit of toleration-the first act by which, since the breaking out of the Reformation, religious discord, hatred and persecution were to cease in a nation of Christians, though of different faiths.

For the understanding of the tolerance and necessity of this famous edict it is fit to observe that by the constitutions of all nations in those days, a heretic or one avowing opinions contrary to the faith or peace of the Church or sect as established, was necessarily a rebel and a criminal in the state. Intolerance was both a public duty and a public principle, and all the laws which in all nations were promulgated for the suppression of the faith and doctrines of the minority, inflicted penalties only for what was in all regarded as a crime. Such laws and penalties were not the dictates of kings or ministers, but an expression of the universal sentiment or popular will ;-as much so as if they had been passed in assemblies of the people by an unrelenting and savage majority. Nor was this popular will itself a novel, or sudden, or violent impulse, but on the contrary a necessary act of duty, in complete consistency with their sense of piety, and with the fixed aversion which men whose minds were violently agitated by theological discussion, felt for those whose faith they believed to be erroneous-and being erroneous, to be bad and sinful.

The power of the Church, as it was called, had but the direct-even if mistaken (and who shall say it was mistaken)— application of the doctrines and duties of Christianity, to the temporal, political and actual affairs and pursuits of men ; and those who seceded in England, Germany, France and elsewhere, did so, claiming that in them remained the same power to make the same

direct, and as they thought, better application of their ideas to the same concerns and objects. And the variety and extent of this attempt to apply their own construction and belief to the conduct and duties of other men may be imagined, when it is observed that every man was then supposed to be at liberty to form his own theory; and if he were eloquent and skilful, to become the leader of a sect, though at the same time it may be remarked that he who formed peculiar opinions and was not also able to support them by a sect, was generally forced to give up his theory or his life.

The Protestants called their fellow Christian Catholics, idolaters and slaves to Rome, bigots and followers of Antichrist, and founded themselves to support their denunciations upon their own construction of the Bible. The Catholics despised their arguments and conclusions, but considered and treated them as enemies to their faith, their government, and their persons. The Protestants would not have been less wise or less humane, if they had contented themselves with their own doctrines and construction, and left their adversaries to their faith in this world, and their fate in the

next. The Catholics stood upon the doctrine of the Church which forbade rebellion in matters of faith and discipline-by the force of which principle they are, for any thing that is known to the contrary, the same now as they have been for eighteen hundred years. The Protestants adhered to their own sense of rectitude-by the force of which rule they thought they were justified in correcting all the errors of all the rest of the world.

When, therefore, Henry IV, a Catholic monarch but lately reconciled to the Church, suspected by the great Catholic nations, scarcely yet trusted by any portion of his own subjects, and more than doubted by the Protestants, granted this edict under the advice of Catholic counsellors, with the approbation of Catholic bishops, and even of the Pope, he and even they are to be looked upon, not only as preceding both their adversaries and the age in liberality and philanthropy, but as perilling, for the sake of harmony, peace, and humanity, his crown

and person, the stability of the monarchy, and the lives and happiness of those of their own faith, since to admit the Protestants to equal rights was to admit the operation of all their principles, and to afford to them the means of again creating the same civil war which had followed every concession hitherto made to them. He was favored by his own genius that he escaped them.

The liberality and philanthropy of this edict are still more striking, when it is considered that the liberty of conscience, of worship, and of opinion was granted to a small minority, whose extinction in any prolonged contest, was a matter of certainty, and to a small minority whose objects, politically, were to overthrow the established religion and law of the land, by the force of arms, as well as of opinions but newly put forth and received by the rest of the nation, who, as greater in number, may be presumed to have been their more than equal in wisdom. It is farther to be considered that this minority was endeavoring to force upon the nation its own opinions, and that those of the same faith who here granted to the minority the indulgence of liberty-for such it was in those days-were in other countries exposed to the penalties and punishment which attended upon an adherence to their own conscience after their monarch or ruler had changed his doctrines.

As this edict consists of ninety-two articles or heads, many of them of only momentary importance or character, it is impossible and unnecessary to give any very minute narration of it. It commands the cessation of religious differences in the shape of wars, troubles, and defamatory libels on the faith of either side. It gives to the Protestants (always styled of the pretended reformed religion-a qualification which was equally annoying to them and necessary in a nation which did not admit theirs to be a reformed religion)—it gives to them security in their residence where they please,-preserving them against molestation or constraint for the exercise of their religion; and moreover forbids all public prosecutions for any thing done during the troubles. It ordains that the Catholic religion shall exist in all places and parts of

the kingdom, and gives to the ecclesiastics of both sides who had been dispossessed of their churches or other property, the right to buy the same back again, or to constrain the actual owner to buy them at a price to be fixed by arbitration of their own choice. Disinheritance or deprivations made on account of adverse religious opinions, were utterly void for time past and to come,—a provision of which it may be observed that it proves as much sense of religious toleration, as insensibility to the rights of persons. The Huguenots were to respect holy and festival days, and their hirelings were not to work out of their shops nor in them, so as to disturb the sacredness of the occasion, a provision promoting charity, since to disturb the days was as offensive as here would be the open violation of Sunday, and even in case of a breach of this rule the search for and arrest of the offender was vested exclusively in the officers of justice. The public worship according to their religion was secured to the Huguenots in certain places, in town and country, where they formed a majority, and it was forbidden to either party to be guilty of irreverence in the sight of the other, or towards his belief. But the public worship of the Catholics was not limited to any place, upon the obvious principle that the minority was not to be equal to the majority-and as the worship of the Protestants was permitted in all those places in which they formed any considerable body, they in truth suffered under no real privation. And as they were limited to particular places (however impolitic such a limitation might be as tempting to an undue concentration of their force in such places), they were less likely to be involved in turmoils and contentions with the populace. In all other respects, however, the Protestant was to enjoy all the rights of a Catholic subject of France, and it may be observed that in this respect no Protestant had ever been deprived of them; their poor and sick were to be admitted into the hospitals; a provision made in restraint of the superstition of the lower orders; they were eligible to any post, office, or station-civil or military. In each parliament, a chamber, equally composed of Catholic and

Huguenot judges, was formed for the trial of causes. Their ministers received support from the crown (and it may be observed that Catholic France is now the only country in the world where dissenters receive public support), and they were allowed to hold, and for many years did hold, general assemblies and conventions, both religious and political, for the management of their own affairs,-under certain regulations, however, which were made with a view to restrain their political and unpatriotic affinities. Lastly, Henry allowed them to retain in their power certain towns and fortified places, partly as a proof of his own good faith and of his confidence in them as good subjects-but more from a sentiment of humanity as providing them with a certain refuge in the event of a popular ebullition.

This edict, therefore, contains all the principles of toleration, and almost all its details all certainly that it was safe or prudent to grant, considering the immense majority of the Catholics, the fixedness of their faith, in which those who did not for one motive or another abandon it, only became more steadfast and convinced,—and the bitterness on both sides, the more exasperated as the result of a civil war, in which the dictates, not only of all religion, but of humanity, had been forgotten, from the time of the assassination of the duke of Guise to the general pacification. Comparing the edict with the present ideas, prevailing in this country, of equal rights, it is certainly liable to objection. But comparing it with the ideas or laws of Germany and England, and other Protestant nations, as they existed before 1598, and down to the beginning of this century, it is a solitary instance of humanity, wisdom, and toleration in religious or political concerns.

This edict was formed upon repeated consultations with the Huguenot ministers and leaders, and canvassed by their conscientious arrogance with the secretary of a hostile power. It was at last made acceptable to them, and extremely distasteful to the Catholics, who, from the scarcity of examples, had not yet learned the beauty of toleration; and when it was finally decreed and pro

mulgated, the one party having got so much more than they could with any reason have aspired to hope-the other received it in silence, and submitted to it in charity and faith.

The particular arrangements and details of it had been entrusted by Henry IV to four of his ministers-men celebrated for their ability, learning, and skill,-two Catholics and two Protestants, who separately and together reflected and deliberated upon its provisions for two years, for they, sensible of the good faith of their monarch, knew that what they were about to promulgate was to become an almost organic law of the kingdom, the principles of which could never be annulled, and the expression and details of which, therefore, required the most delicate consideration of rival and often bitterly hostile interests. When the edict was published, as much nicety was required to compound and settle the heartburnings and jealousies which it occasioned.

In the course of a little time the two parties began to be accustomed to their novel and somewhat awkward condition of civility and humanity towards each other, the inconsiderateness of zeal, and the turbulence of opinion were gradually suppressed by mildness and by punishment. And the sentiment that the rights of each party were bounded and secured by law, inspired both with respect and reverence for the government.

In this state the parties remained until about the year 1616, without any violent outbreak, and without any more serious trouble than that of compelling the courts to listen to claims and complaints, sometimes reasonable, sometimes vexatious, and generally irritating, though of very small moment. And if the Huguenots had not been led by the very nature of their institutes to sympathise with the political tendencies of other countries, they probably would never have had occasion to complain of constraint or persecution. But in 1615 they were suspected, and as one at least of their historians admits, suspected with reason, of a political design to form a distinct government—and that a republic-in France, and to separate themselves from the nation. In