While the events we have described in the preceding chapter were taking place in the north and west of France, the rest of that beautiful land was a prey to anarchy and all the direst evils of civil war. In our favored country, where internecine strife has been so long unknown, and where, even in its worst days, Englishmen never forgot that they were brothers, we can hardly picture to ourselves the frightful condition of France during the whole reign of Charles IX. A few scattered incidents must be taken as a sample of the hideous mass of horrors: to repeat a tenth part of them would sicken and disgust the least sensitive of readers.

Foremost among the blood-stained heroes of these cruel scenes are two personages, distinct yet alike, to whom no parallel can be found except in the sanguinary butchers of the Revolution of 1789. They are Montluc and Des Adrets.

Blaise de Montluc had distinguished himself in the Italian wars of Francis I. He had been made prisoner at Pavia, and had decided the wavering fortunes of Cerisoles. As lieutenant of Guyenne he was ordered to reduce that province to submission, and he did it in a very characteristic manner, putting his Huguenot prisoners to death without permitting them to say a word, “for they have golden tongues.” Terror was his great weapon, and he used to boast that any one could know which way he had passed by the “marks” he left upon the trees by the roadside, adding, with a grim smile, that “one man hanging frightens more than a hundred slain.” His “Commentaries,” an autobiographical sketch, which he composed when years and disease prevented his using the sword any longer, are a curious illustration of the state of mind to which a man can be brought who makes mere military discipline the principle of his actions. Reform was insubordination; “obedience to the king’s edict or death”—he allowed no middle course. One day he hanged six prisoners without a minute’s delay. “Why,” said the terrified neighbors when they heard of it, “he puts men to death without trial.” What need of trial? he would have replied; you are in arms against the king. At St. Mezard four prisoners were brought before him as he stood in the church-yard, his two executioners behind him with their swords drawn; they always accompanied him, with cords and other implements of their office. One of the prisoners was charged with seditious language. Montluc caught him violently by the throat: “Rascal, how dare you insult the king with your ribald tongue?” “Mercy, mercy!” cried the man. “What! expect me to spare you when you have not spared your king!” And, in a towering passion, Montluc threw the poor wretch to the ground, his head falling on a broken monument. “Strike, scoundrel!” roared Blaise to one of his executioners; and at the word the sword fell, decapitating the man, and chipping a fragment of stone from the slab. Two others were hanged on a tree hard by, and the fourth was scourged so severely that he died a few days after. Montluc complacently adds, “And this was the first execution I ordered after starting from home, without trial or sentence, for I have heard say that in these matters you should hang first.... It shut the mouths of many seditious people.” He avenged M. Fumel’s murder by hanging or breaking on the wheel in one day between thirty and forty persons, innocent as well as guilty. The hot-headed Huguenots of the south retaliated at Cahors by hanging as many Catholics as they could catch, fourteen or fifteen in number, who had assisted Montluc in his atrocities. At Gironde he made a capture of some eighty Huguenots, of whom he hanged seventy to the pillars of the market-house “sans autre cérémonie.” Describing his doings at the village of Feugaroles, he says: “We were so few that we were not able to kill all: the bandoliers shot them down like game.” In one of his expeditions he fell in with the Queen of Navarre, who received him very badly, and to his great surprise “called him a tyrant,” and otherwise reproached him. His ferocity he considered a virtue, and justified his cruelty as necessary to get the better of his enemies. “God,” he adds, “must be very merciful to us, considering the evils we commit.”[337] He was thankful not without reason, for at the end of the war he was richer by 100,000 crowns.

Still more ferocious, and, if possible, with still fewer redeeming qualities, was François de Beaumont, baron des Adrets, whose name is still used in the south to scare naughty children. Ostensibly he was a Protestant, but in reality a mere agent of the queen-mother against the Lorraine party.[338] He would sometimes amuse himself by making his prisoners leap from the top of a tower, or from a high window, on the pikes of his soldiers stationed below. On one occasion—it was at Montbrison, in August, 1562—a prisoner hesitated, upon which Des Adrets reproached him with cowardice. The other retorted: “I dare you to do it in ten times,” which caused his life to be spared. The slaughter in that little town was fearful: more than eight hundred men, women, and children were murdered; the streets were strewn with corpses, and “the gutters looked as if it had rained blood,” says a contemporary. At another time, though this belongs to a different period of his history—the baron marched to besiege Valence, where (as we shall see presently) the Reformed had revolted and seized upon the Grey Friars’ Church. In defiance of his threats, they publicly celebrated the Lord’s Supper in the appropriated church, as many as 5000 partaking of the sacrament. They afterward came to terms with him, agreeing to open their gates and restore the church; but Des Adrets had no sooner entered than he seized a number of Protestants and sentenced them to lose their heads. They were taken to punishment with their mouths gagged; and after being dismembered, their limbs were fastened to the doors of the church they had profaned.[339] Strange to say, however, the baron professed to deplore the cruel necessities of war, and excused his barbarities by pleading that it was not cruelty to retaliate. “The first acts are cruelties,” he said, “the second mere justice.” De Thou, who saw him at Grenoble, describes his green and vigorous old age, his fierce eyes, and thin, fleshless features, marked, like Sylla’s, with red spots, as of blood.[340]

The ferocity of Des Adrets was exceeded by the atrocities committed under the eyes of Cardinal Strozzi, Bishop of Albi, who excited the populace of Gaillac to massacre their Protestant brethren, with whom they had hitherto lived on friendly terms. About seventy Huguenots were seized as they were attending divine worship, and thrust into a dungeon of the abbey of St. Michael, situated on a precipitous rock above the river Tarn. A laborer, wearing the judicial cap and robe of a magistrate whom he had killed, went through the farce of trying the prisoners and condemning them to be thrown from the wall into the river. Boatmen were stationed on the banks of the stream to brain such as were not killed by the fall.

In the south of France, the Reformed doctrines had extended more widely and struck deeper root than in other parts of that kingdom. This difference was owing to a combination of many causes. The great cities of Provence and Languedoc still retained many of their municipal privileges, dating from the time of the Roman dominion, which made them almost republican. This begat the spirit of independence which always accompanies self-government. Moreover, the Albigensian crusade of the thirteenth century had not exterminated heresy: the opinions that had been so bitterly persecuted fastened their roots deep in the hearts of the southern population, where they lay, generation after generation, waiting for the opportunity of displaying themselves. It came at last, and with it a desire to revenge themselves on the descendants of those who had devastated the fair south with fire and sword. It was an oppressed nation rising against their oppressors, the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children. At the first outbreak of hostilities, the Huguenots seized upon the churches, which they purified of all marks of idolatry, destroying the relics and making a jest of the consecrated wafer. In some towns they entirely forbade the Catholic worship, turned the nuns from their convents, and even compelled them to marry. Beza, in a letter to the Queen of Navarre, expressed himself plainly, though not very strongly, upon the matter: “About this destruction of images I can say nothing more than what I have always felt and preached, that such a mode of procedure does not at all please me.” The violation of sepulture he declared to be utterly without excuse, and that Condé was determined to punish it.

At Orange, the capital of the little principality which gave a title to William III. of England, and to his still more illustrious predecessor, the liberator of Holland, the Huguenots had long enjoyed an unusual immunity from persecution; but the news of the massacre at Vassy, and the threatening language of their orthodox neighbors, made them arm in self-defense. This but accelerated the crisis; the Catholics attacked the city, which, after a stout resistance, was captured, and treated as a fortress taken by storm (6th May, 1562). Serbelloni, who commanded the pontifical auxiliaries, excited his followers to their bloody work. They spared neither age nor sex: all the sick in the hospital were killed, some being tossed from the windows on the spears of the soldiers below. Women were hanged to the balconies of houses, and made targets to be shot at. But this was the least of the atrocities they had to suffer at the hands of a licentious soldiery, who often took pleasure in destroying their victims by the most lingering tortures they could devise.[341] When Montbrun captured Mornas, where these butchers had taken refuge, he put them all to death, and threw their bodies into the river, having stuck on them a notice to the “toll-keepers of Avignon to permit the ruffians to pass, as they had paid the toll already.”

On the 25th April, 1562, the Seigneur de la Motte-Gondrin, who was governor of Dauphiny in the absence of the Duke of Guise, seized the gates of Valence; but his force was not strong enough to hold the city, which the next day was retaken by the Huguenot citizens, aided by their brethren of Montelimart and other places. Gondrin himself was attacked at his lodging, and the rebels having set fire to it to drive him out, he and all his party were slain. Among them was the provost of the city, upon whom was found a missive from the Duke of Guise, ordering him to “massacre and put to death all followers of the Gospel without any regard to age or sex.”[342]

The disturbances at Lyons began in the night of the 12th April, when the Catholics, “without any provocation,” rose in several parts of the city. About a dozen persons were murdered, and among them a woman, who fell by the hand of her own son. The governor, De Saulx, called in reinforcements, while the Huguenots were strengthened by the arrival of two hundred men from the surrounding Protestant towns. Both parties, watching each other, kept under arms for a fortnight, until Wednesday the 26th, when the Protestants, to the number of 1200, assembled in their temple, and after invoking the blessing of God upon their enterprise, marched out, occupied the Saone bridge, and made themselves masters of the city. Every convent was broken open, every friar and nun turned out.[343] In this tumult only three persons were killed, and as many wounded. A treaty was now arranged with the Senate, who promised to assign churches to the Protestants. The citizens who had left for religion were permitted to return, the mass was abolished, liberty of conscience proclaimed, and the Senate was in future to be composed of twelve Protestant and as many Catholic councilors.[344] But the Huguenots do not appear to have kept to the spirit of the treaty, however faithfully they may have adhered to the letter. They committed devastations that would have disgraced the Vandals. Churches were ravaged, tombs broken open, coffins stripped of their lead and their gold or silver plates; the bells were broken up and the basilica of the Maccabees destroyed by gunpowder. There does not appear to have been any private plunder, and this is the only redeeming feature in these riotous scenes.

The flagrant violations of the January edict by the Catholics roused the Huguenots of La Rochelle to assert their rights, and accordingly the Lord’s Supper was administered with much solemnity—not without the walls, but in the very heart of the city—in the Place de la Bourserie, on the 31st May. Armed men closed every avenue, and a guard of forty soldiers patrolled the adjacent streets to prevent violence. About four in the afternoon, the people, excited by the novelty of the spectacle and the language of the preachers, rushed to the churches, threw down the altars, and burned the images.[345] The Count of Jarnac and the mayor, who were both Calvinists, vehemently but ineffectually condemned such violence, and were supported by the ministers. Some priests who had been shut up in the Lantern Tower were stabbed and thrown half dead into the sea. One Stephen Chamois, a Carmelite monk, had escaped from the city; but being recognized at Aunai in Saintonge, he was called upon to abjure, and, on his refusing to do so, was murdered on the spot.

The city of Toulouse was notorious for the ferocity of its population—a character which it has preserved nearly to our own day. At this time the Protestant inhabitants were estimated at 20,000 souls—a manifest exaggeration, although it was one of the most populous cities of France. Their number was certainly numerous enough to ensure a certain amount of toleration, and matters went on quietly until the Pacification of Amboise. When the Parliament of Toulouse received the edict, with instructions to see it properly observed, they protested and sent a deputation to the king, praying him, in case the edict could not be altered, “to permit them to sell their property and go elsewhere, preferring to lose their goods, and even their lives, rather than their faith.” Their petition had received no answer, when in the month of April (1562) a disturbance occurred at a funeral. Some lives were lost and the murderers were punished. The excited Protestants immediately rose and seized the gates and the Hôtel-de-Ville; and the parliament, determined to crush the insurrection at any cost, called upon the populace to arm in the defense of religion and order. They rushed like beasts of prey upon their victims; they filled the prisons, tossed Huguenots alive out of the windows of their houses, threw them into the Garonne, and if the poor wretches tried to crawl out of the water, they were beaten down with stones and staves. In May the two parties came to an arrangement by which the Huguenots agreed to leave the city in a body; but they were not to escape so easily. The Catholic peasants of the neighborhood waylaid the smaller and unarmed bodies, and killed between 3000 and 4000 of them. Thrice the king granted an amnesty to the Protestant citizens; thrice the parliament refused to register it, and continued their vindictive measures.[346]

On the other side of France a similar voluntary expatriation occurred. The inhabitants of Sisteron left their city. For twenty-two days a crowd of both sexes and all ages wandered through the wild inhospitable country of the Upper Durance, passing the night in remote and desert valleys. Many perished by the swords of the Catholics; many died of hunger and exhaustion; the remainder at last entered the friendly walls of Grenoble, singing psalms of deliverance.

At Macon, where the church was barely two years old, the Huguenots made themselves masters of the city, which was recovered by Tavannes a few months later (19th August, 1562). He plundered every thing on which he could lay his hand, and is reported to have picked up enough to buy an estate of 10,000 livres a year. His wife, who was equally unscrupulous, contrived to fill one hundred and eighty trunks with linen, jewelry, ornaments, etc. No wonder that, after such an example, men of high rank fomented discord and cherished persecution. St. Point was appointed governor. He was the son of a priest, and “thoroughly bloody and more than cruel,” said Beza. After dinner, when the ladies went out to walk, he used to amuse them by throwing his prisoners off the bridge into the Saone, jesting at their struggles to save their lives. This savage sport the Catholics named “la farce de St. Point;” but it is better known in history as the “sauteries,” or “leaps of Macon.” The governor justified these cruelties as being mere retaliation for similar barbarities committed by Des Adrets at Montbrison, which the latter in his turn justified by the outrages at Orange. Thus one excess leads to another: abyssus abyssum invocat.

At Limoux in Languedoc, the disturbances were so many and so often accompanied by loss of life that Marshal de Foix entered the town to enforce the law (6th June, 1562). This he effected by letting his soldiery loose upon the inhabitants without distinction of religion. One Catholic, dwelling outside the walls, had his eyes plucked out and his nose cut off; another was killed as he left mass, and his body thrown naked into the road. The value of the booty acquired by the marshal was estimated at three or four hundred thousand livres. At Castelnaudary, as the Catholics were walking in procession on Palm Sunday (1562), they set fire to a mill in which the Protestants were worshiping outside the town, and killed all who tried to escape. The number of victims amounted to sixty, among whom were the treasurer of Catherine de Medicis, three municipal councilors, and the minister, whose bowels were torn out and burned in a bonfire. At St. Calais in the Vendomois the Protestants put a garrison in the monastery, which was like a fortress, with its ditches, ramparts, and flanking towers. The monks called for help, and one day, when the bell rang for vespers, they headed their allies and killed thirty of the Huguenots. A bloody retaliation soon followed: a resolute band, collected from the surrounding district, stormed the abbey and put to death nearly all the priests and monks they found in it. At Issoudun in Berry (Aug., 1562), the soldiery rebaptized the little Huguenot children, even a girl of thirteen being held naked over the font. One Furet was about to be hanged without trial, and had already mounted the ladder, when the king’s advocate suggested that it would be well to go through some judicial formality. Accordingly Furet was led back to prison, confronted with witnesses, condemned, and executed within an hour. At Roquebrun two Catholics who protested against the cruelties there perpetrated had their eyes plucked out by order of De Brezons. At Aurillac every house was stripped from roof to cellar.[347] At Auxerre, a street riot in the month of August, in which a man was killed, was the signal for a rising. The wife of the castellan of Avallon was stabbed with many daggers, and flung into the river. Being young and strong, she swam for some time, until a boatman killed her with an oar. Her body was then drawn ashore and exposed to unmentionable brutalities. Two months later, when the Protestants were assembled for worship at a pressoir outside the town, they were attacked, but fortunately escaped. Their houses, however, were pillaged and one man so maltreated that he died shortly after. Tavannes was sent to restore order, and he hanged three Catholics, but by way of compensation inflicted a similar punishment on five Huguenots. At Bar-sur-Seine, Ralet, the king’s proctor, put his own son to death for being found among the Protestants.[348] The historian who reports this adds that the Catholics cut open the bodies of women and children to eat their hearts. These and other abominations which he records are probably the invention, or at least the exaggeration, of religious party spirit.

In the little town of Bellesme a man was hanged for declaring the costume of the Virgin to be indecent, and another shot because he would not go to vespers. At Epernay in Champagne, a man who had been thrown half dead into the Marne, was revived by the shock. He floated down the river until he reached a sheltered place, where he got out, but was followed, caught, and drowned in a deep hole. Some of the spectators, who were Catholics, could not restrain their tears, for which they were beaten and left for dead. Charles d’Argennes, Bishop of Le Mans, who had been expelled by the Huguenots, raised a band of ruffians who plundered the farm-houses and robbed the travelers on the roads. One victim was hung up by the feet after his eyes were plucked out. The bishop hanged two hundred persons, some of whom were very young boys, and two madmen, who went singing and dancing to the gallows. A woman was killed and her mouth stuffed with leaves torn from the New Testament. The bishop’s lieutenant, Boisjourdan, distinguished himself by a crime without parallel even in that cruel age. Two children, whose mother had been put to death, went and begged him to restore part of her confiscated property to keep them from starvation. He received them kindly, and sat them down at table to dine with him. At a given signal a soldier took the boy, a lad of fourteen, under the pretense of showing him his bed, led him into the garden, there strangled him, and threw the body into a pond. He then fetched the sister, who went out joyfully to meet her brother, whose fate she shared after she had been foully abused. For such atrocities the pope rewarded Argennes by making him a cardinal in 1570.

Similar ferocities were alleged against the Huguenots, many of which are unfortunately too true. Thus we find the people of Dieppe (the Rochelle of northern France) pillaging and defacing churches, and melting down the sacred vessels, from which they collected 1200 pounds of silver. In bands of 200 and 300 they made forays into the adjacent districts—to Eu and Arques—from which they never returned empty-handed. We read of their dragging priests into Dieppe tied to their horses’ tails and flogging them at beat of drum in the market-place. Some were thrown into the sea in their sacerdotal robes; some were fastened to a cross and dragged through the streets by ropes round their necks; and, to crown all, some were buried in the ground up to the shoulders, while the Huguenots, as if playing a game of nine-pins, flung huge wooden balls at their heads.[349]

A few weeks after the war broke out, the Protestants of Bayeux rose against the clergy, committing the customary devastations, besides violating the tombs and throwing out the mouldering corpses. They gutted the bishop’s palace, and made a bonfire of the chapter library, then the richest in all France. The priests and others who opposed them were barbarously murdered and tossed from the walls into the ditch. When the Duke of Etampes restored order, the Catholics took a terrible revenge on their former persecutors. Once more, in March 1565, the Huguenots gained the upper hand, when the troops under Coligny refused to be bound by the terms of capitulation. Private houses were stripped of all the gold, silver, copper, and lead that could be found; priests who resisted were flogged, dragged up and down the streets by a rope at their necks, and then killed. Children were murdered in their mothers’ arms; one Thomas Noel, a lawyer, was hanged at his own window; and an unhappy woman had her face stained with the blood of her own son, who had been killed before her eyes. Here, too, more priests were buried up to the neck, and their heads made to serve as targets for the soldiers’ bullets; others were disemboweled and their bodies filled with straw. The priest of St. Ouen—we shudder as we record such horrors—was seized by four soldiers, who “larded” him like a capon, roasted him, cut him up, and threw the flesh to the dogs.[350]

It would have been well had these deeds of brutality been confined to Normandy; but they were repeated all over France. One Friar Viroleau died of the consequences of a barbarous mutilation. Other priests or Catholic people were killed by hanging, speared to death, left to die of hunger, sawn in two, or burned at a slow fire. All this happened in Angoulême. At Montbrun a woman was burned on her legs and feet with red-hot tongs. The lieutenant-general of Angoulême and the wife of the lieutenant-criminal of that city were first mutilated, then strangled, and their corpses dragged through the streets. At Chasseneuil in the vicinity, a priest, one Loys Fayard, was shot to death after having been tortured by having his hands plunged in boiling oil, some of which had been poured into his mouth. The vicar of St. Auzanni was mutilated, shut up in a chest, and burned to death. In the parish of Rivières others had their tongues cut off, their feet burned, and their eyes torn out; they were hung up by the legs, or thrown from the walls. Other atrocities were committed which can not be described without offending propriety. One Huguenot is said to have gone about with a chain of priests’ ears around his neck.[351] In 1562 men did not stop to ask whether these things were true or false; they were passed from mouth to mouth and believed, just as the vulgar even now believe any story, however wild or improbable, that falls in with their peculiar temper or prejudices. The Catholic burned with indignation as he listened to the story of these outrages—sometimes related to him from the pulpit—outrages against the men and the things that he reverenced most upon earth. Blasphemy against God might be pardoned, but against the Virgin Mary—never! They retaliated immediately upon all the Huguenots within their power, and with all the more cruelty and persistency that they fervently believed they were doing God a service.

But these are scenes too disgusting to dwell upon, and we gladly turn to less savage, though hardly to purer scenes. The hostility between the two sects showed itself at court by quarrels between the ladies, the Princess of Condé and the Duchess of Ferrara heading one party, and the widowed Duchess of Guise the other. The queen-mother tried in vain to check their feminine disputes. The Huguenot ladies would not give way. Chantonnay says of them: “They do little else at court than preach sermons and sing psalms. Daily prayers are said in the apartments of the Prince of Condé, with the help of all who have the will and the ability to go there.”

These party questions were momentarily silenced by the necessity of getting rid of the foreign garrison which still occupied Havre. The Huguenots, as well as the Catholics, were pleased at the opportunity of showing their prowess against “the natural enemy of France.” The former, aware of the great blunder they had committed in the treaty of Hampton Court, were eager to drive out the English, who did not feel the slightest inclination to depart. Queen Elizabeth’s policy may have been national, but it was very shabby and prejudicial to the Huguenot cause. “We are resolutely determined to keep Newhaven [Havre], except they will resolve to restore us Calais,” wrote Cecil on Christmas Day, 1562.[352] When he heard that peace had been made at Orleans “without consideration of us,” he added: “If it be so, I know the worst, which is, by stout and stiff dealing, to make our own bargain.”[353] And yet, after these big words, the English government did nothing, though the governor of Havre (the Earl of Warwick) urgently demanded supplies and reinforcements, which did not sail until the place had capitulated. With sanctimonious resignation Sir E. Warner wrote to Cecil: “The loss of Newhaven so suddenly and in such sort, as it seemeth, I am sorry for to the bottom of my heart. But against God’s ordinance no man can stand.” The garrison had suffered terribly from the plague, which they brought with them to England, where it is computed to have killed 20,000 persons in London and the out-parishes.

Condé, who had fought valiantly at Havre, hoped that his services to the monarchy would be repaid by promotion to the office of Lieutenant-General of France, vacant by the death of his elder brother, Anthony of Navarre. Catherine had held this out as a lure without the remotest intention of keeping her promise. She probably found that the throne would be weakened by being kept longer in tutelage, and therefore, with L’Hopital’s concurrence, anticipated the young king’s majority by twelve months, ordering it to be declared as soon as he entered his fourteenth year, and thus obviated the necessity of appointing a new lieutenant-general. The ceremony took place at Rouen, it being feared that the Parliament of Paris, in which Condé had friends, would refuse to register the edict of majority. On the 17th August, 1563, Charles went down to the courts of law in great state, and after announcing the close of his minority, he declared that he would not permit the repetition of such acts of insubordination as he had witnessed during the recent hostilities, and that he desired the Edict of Pacification should be kept in all its provisions.

Charles appears at this time to have been an amiable youth: he possessed good natural qualities, and his attempts in poetry (if they are his own) are not entirely unworthy of Marot, to whom they are addressed. He had in early days a fair taste for literature, and had he continued under the training of Amyot and Cipierre, he might have been worthy of the throne. With such a mother as Catherine, and such tutors as she gave him, he could hardly fail to become treacherous and cruel. We shall see at times his better nature breaking through, but the evil spirit within him was never thoroughly conquered.

There exists a curious letter written about this time by Catherine to her son, giving him instructions as to the conduct of his life.[354] He is exhorted to rise early, to go to mass with his four secretaries, to dine not later than eleven o’clock, to ride or walk for three hours, to hunt, to read his letters every day and see that they are punctually answered, and to have the keys of the palace brought to him each night and placed under his pillow. There are other exhortations of a similar nature—such as would make him “the first gentleman of the day,” but would not tend to make him a good Christian. Had she wished to see her son a good man, Catherine would have given him proper tutors, and not such as Gondi, whom Brantome describes as “cunning, corrupt, false, and blasphemous.”

The termination of the sittings of the Council of Trent (December, 1563), imported another element of confusion into the religious differences of the age. The council, although summoned in 1541, did not actually meet until December, 1545. It had been hoped that some means would be found of healing the divisions in the Church, but one after another every form of Protestant opinion was eliminated from the new creed, and reconciliation became impossible. The articles of the council were made compulsory in every Catholic state; but the Church of France was so far independent that the solemn consent of the crown was required to make the decrees valid. They might, indeed, be received as articles of faith, but could not be pleaded in a court of law until ratified by the sovereign. To procure that ratification, the King of Spain dispatched an embassador, accompanied by a deputation from the Dukes of Tuscany and Lorraine, inviting Charles to send commissioners to Nancy, where an assembly of princes was to meet to consult on the best measures to be adopted for the extirpation of heresy. L’Hopital, foreseeing the deadly consequences of such a step, advised the queen-mother to receive the embassy and deputation very politely, detain them at court as long as possible, and dismiss them at last with an evasive answer. “The government,” says Languet, “have no idea of taking away the liberty granted by the late edict; for (to omit other reasons) they see that it can not be done without a disturbance, as our churches are more crowded than they have ever been.”[355] Independently of this consideration, we find Santa Croce writing to Cardinal Borromeo (12th Oct., 1564) an account of an interview with the queen. After listening patiently to his message from the Holy Father relative to the introduction of the Tridentine decrees, she replied: “No one can feel a more ardent desire for the observance of the council than myself; but affairs are in such a state that I am compelled to handle them very delicately, and it is impossible to issue any fresh edicts just now. Whenever circumstances permit, I will do as his Holiness desires.” This was no new language. In the instructions to his embassadors at the council, the king declared that considering the number of the heretics, he could not attempt to put down the new religion by force, without endangering both crown and state.[356]