M. de BÈze was succeeded in the Presidency of the Venerable Company of Pastors by Simon Goulart—the warrior whom we have seen excusing himself for not fighting against the Duke of Savoy on the ground that he had no coat of mail. In his new office, however, Simon needed no armour, for the period from the Escalade of 1603 to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was quiet and uneventful. The great name of the epoch was that of Jean Diodati, Milton’s friend, the theologian who pulverized the Arminians at the Synod of Dordrecht. Other names are those of Trembley, Tronchin, Turretini, and Calendrini; and there is not a name among them which need detain us. The town was at peace with its neighbours; commerce and industry flourished; and the ecclesiastical discipline gradually lost its grip upon the city, or was, at least, restricted to a narrower field of usefulness. We hear of a good many new sumptuary laws, but we also gather that many of them were only a means of accentuating class distinctions, and that there was a growing difficulty in enforcing them. We find persons burnt alive for witchcraft at the beginning of the period, but not towards the end of it; we hear of doubts diffusing themselves as to the efficacy of torture in extracting the truth from witnesses; and we find even heresy dealt with less rigorously than of old. A heretic who was sentenced to be ‘strangled in the usual manner’ had the sentence, without difficulty, commuted into one of ten years’ banishment.

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes inevitably brought a fresh flood of immigrants—1,450 in a single week, 800 in a single day—but Geneva was by no means disposed to welcome them so hospitably as in the time of M. de BÈze. Seventy years of prosperity had sapped some of the primitive virtues of the people; they had conceived a dread of foreign competition, and of the pauper alien, even though the pauper alien was an exile for conscience’ sake. Their disposition was rather to seek excuses for passing the pauper aliens on, and make them chargeable upon the hospitality of their Swiss allies, or of the Germans or the Dutch. To some extent they succeeded; but a considerable number of the immigrants settled in the town in spite of the political disabilities imposed upon them, and soon became a source of trouble. All through the eighteenth century—or at all events from 1707 until 1794—there was intermittent political turmoil. A detailed account of the agitations and disturbances hardly falls within the scope of such a work as the present; but it may be as well to sum them up, and describe their general character.