When the news of Terride’s downfall was known to Montluc he made overtures to Damville in spite of his resentment. A council of war was held at Auch, but instead of coming himself the marshal sent Joyeuse to say that he thought it his duty to pass his time in his own government, considering the charge the country was under to sustain the war. It is interesting to observe the ancient ideas of provincial separation and autonomy asserting themselves at this time. In vain Montluc argued that the real enemy was in Guyenne and that the local hostility of the Huguenots in Languedoc was a little matter in comparison; that all Catholics were equally the King’s subjects and that the country was the King’s.[1412] Joyeuse answered that the estates of Languedoc would not pay for Montluc’s army unless he employed their money in recovering the places in their province. The decision abandoned Guyenne, leaving it alone and single handed, for the King’s forces were engaged in the protracted siege of St. Jean-d’AngÉly and could not come to its relief. “J’ay tousjours ouy dire que plus prÈs est la chemise que la robbe,” said Montluc satirically.[1413]

The old man was on the point of discharging his army and retiring to Libourne or Agen, but the duty of a soldier forbade him. If he now abandoned the open country in so critical a condition, it would ever have been a reproach to him. He thought better of himself and attacked Mont-de-Marsan instead, where he placated his outraged feelings by refusing the petition of the garrison to capitulate and secretly gave orders for the massacre of the entire number save the captain, Favas.[1414] This feat of arms insured the future of Gascony and the Landes, for the city served as a granary for all the surrounding country from whence, however, to the detriment of France, much grain was exported to Spain.[1415] After this exploit, feeling the impossibility of maintaining his forces in the field, Montluc disbanded his army, sending his son to Lectoure and himself retiring to Agen. It goaded him to the quick that the crown approved throughout of Damville’s conduct and either ignored his own complaints, or criticized him for what he had done. “I was born under a planet to be ever subject to calumny,” he growled. “Age deprives a man of his heat: for in my younger days the greatest prince upon earth could not have made me swallow such a pill.”

It may have been that Damville had friends at court and Montluc none; it may have been that the marshal’s pride of long descent made him indifferent or even contemptuous of Montluc in some degree. But if we look closely at things it is evident that the spirit of provincial separation was the fundamental source of the difficulty between them. This spirit penetrated to the very bottom. Both Montluc and Damville were making war with men levied from the country in which they were—with militia instead of regular troops. The consequence of this was that every man in the host had an eye to the welfare of his family or his friends instead of to the King’s business; moreover, many had relatives or friends with the enemy, which made them fight reluctantly; finally, they were ill-paid and had to subsist on plunder, which debauched discipline. The true remedy would have been for Charles IX to have raised the useless siege of St. Jean-d’AngÉly and to have come in person into the southland, where the authority of the King might have overcome the local forces of separation; and where the regulars would have plied war as a trade, as the circumstances demanded.

The Catholics of the south had an example before their eyes in the reiters with the admiral, of the efficiency of regular troops over local forces. Coligny owed his future to them and Montgomery. The way the reiters made war excited the admiration of trained soldiers like Montluc. They so barricaded the villages in which they quartered themselves that nothing was to be got by assault and in the open country they were always mounted at the least alarm. It was very hard to surprise them. They were careful of their horses and arms and so terrible in action “that a man could see nothing but fire and steel.” The very grooms fought.[1416]

The reverses experienced at Poitiers, Moncontour, and St. Jean-d’AngÉly had not been fatal to the Protestants. In the middle of December Coligny wrote to the captain of La CharitÉ that he felt ready to resume the offensive in the spring, having in La Rochelle, Cognac, AngoulÊme, Montauban, Castres, La CharitÉ, and Montpellier a chain of impregnable fortresses extending from the seaboard clear to the heart of France, and controlling the Loire.[1417] A survey of the map will show the strength of the Huguenots in this part of France. All of Provence and Lower Languedoc was in full control of the Protestants, Montauban, Albi, and Castres, constituting a line of defense on the west. In Upper Languedoc they were not so strong and the condition of the Catholics was less precarious, since Toulouse, Auch, Agen, and Cahors, formed a quadrilateral in the very center. The Huguenots controlled many of the lesser towns, so that Montluc complained that time and again he had to pass through their hands “and for the least affair trot up and down with great trouble from city to city. Would to God that, as they do in Spain, we had made our constant abode in the good towns; we had then both more riches and more authority.”[1418]

Guyenne was safely Catholic if it could continue to hold its own; for this important fact Montluc richly deserves credit.[1419] But Guyenne, Gascony, and Upper Languedoc were isolated from the Catholic north by a broad Protestant strip running southeastward from La Rochelle to Montpellier through Saintes, Cognac, AngoulÊme, Chalais, Bergerac, Montauban, Albi, Castres, BÉziers, and Montpellier, which united Saintonge on the seaboard with Provence and DauphinÉ. But, on the other hand, BÉarn was separated from the main trunk of Calvinism and was not yet safe, in spite of Montgomery’s success, unless it were bound to the main trunk. The Huguenot leaders realized this, and one of Coligny’s adroitest strokes, after Moncontour, was the seizure of Port-Ste. Marie, below Agen on the Garonne, with the aid of the German reiters.[1420] The capture of this place (November 29, 1569) insured the passage of the Garonne to the Huguenots[1421] and accomplished for those of the far south what the possession of La CharitÉ insured to those of central France, for it bridged the Garonne. Later, when Bernard d’Astarac, baron de Martamot, early in the following January (1570) recovered Tarbes[1422] on the Adour, the Huguenots had a chain of fortresses running straight north from BÉarn through Condom and NÉrac to Bergerac and AngoulÊme, and Catholic Gascony and Guyenne were cut in twain.

Montluc, having fortified Agen, the capture of which would have been another disaster to the Catholics, then set to work to contrive how to break the bridge of boats which Coligny had constructed. A mason who had once built a floating mill for the marquis de Villars above Port-Ste. Marie came to him and suggested loading the mill with stone, cutting it loose, and letting it float down stream with the hope of breaking the bridge. The Garonne at this time was swollen with winter rains. The leaders were skeptical of the scheme, as the bridge was known to be protected by heavy cables above stream. But the captain Thodeas, an engineer with Montluc, supported the mason, after secretly surveying the structure. The novel battering-ram accomplished the work intended. Shortly before midnight the mill was loosed from its moorings, one of the soldiers being drowned in unchaining it. Coligny’s artillery, when it loomed through the darkness, made a desperate attempt to sink it by fire from the batteries at either end of the bridge, but in vain. The mill struck the bridge with such a shock that cables, chains, and boats all went to pieces with a crash. Two of the boats went down as far as St. Macaire and some, it was said, were picked up as far down as Bordeaux.[1423]

The destruction of the bridge was a heavy blow to the Protestants for it cut their forces into two parts. Besides Montgomery, very many of the reiters were caught on that side of the river toward Gascony. But Coligny’s enterprise robbed adversity of its sting. He improvised a bridge of two boats, upon which five or six horses could be carried at once, the boats being hauled by cable, after the Italian manner. It required an hour and a half to go and return, yet at last, with great pains and difficulty the whole company of reiters was got across stream. Montluc had proposed to Candale and La Valette that an attack be made upon Montgomery who was quartered at Condom, south of NÉrac. But they were so slow in responding that Montgomery, too, was able to pass over, first his horse and then his foot, one after the other, it requiring five or six days for all his forces to make the transit.[1424]

But the admiral and Montgomery followed up this clever deed by a blunder so bad that the Reformed suffered for it for years afterward, and were saved from losing BÉarn, perhaps, as they had almost lost it before, by the intervention of the Peace of St. Germain. Coligny’s original plan was to pass the rest of the winter and until harvest in Gascony and Guyenne, with Port Ste. Marie as his base and to have heavy artillery brought from the fortresses of BÉarn with which to take all the towns upon the Garonne as far as Bordeaux. The bridge assured them control of two of the richest provinces of France, for they were absolute masters of the field. By this means Bordeaux would have been at their mercy, for the sea power of the Huguenots at Blaye[1425] was sufficient to close the city upon the sea side. It could not have held out for more than three months, for already corn was selling there at ten livres per sack. Bordeaux itself was rich and strong but situated in a barren country, so that, deprived of the Garonne and Dordogne, it could presently be reduced to famine. As for the Protestant army it would have fared well. The lesser towns like Libourne and Lectoure must inevitably have succumbed with their stores, and the viscounts were in full possession of Comenge and Loumaigne, the most fertile counties of all Guyenne. There were numerous stores of grain here, for it was a practice of the dealers and even gentlemen, to accumulate three or four years’ store in anticipation of a dear year. Had the Huguenots once got Bordeaux in their clutches, they might have boasted that they had the best and strongest angle of the kingdom, both by land and sea, commanding five navigable rivers. The bridges over the Charente at Saintes and Cognac, being in their hands, no one could pass from Saintonge to Bordeaux where La Noue lay, “as valiant a man as any that ever was in France.” The river system of the southwest—the Charente, Ile, Dordogne, Lot, and Garonne—could have been made to bind the whole region into a compact whole if this plan had been carried out, and from behind these natural barriers the Protestants might have defied all the King’s armies.

Yet although Coligny’s army tasted of Bordeaux wine and his reiters watered their horses in the Garonne, he did not go on. He failed to see that the most vital need of the Huguenots was to gain complete mastery of the sea. This is what La Noue perceived and Coligny did not. After the loss of Rouen they had but one important port town at their command, La Rochelle, which the blunders of the government in the second civil war had permitted the Protestants to make their own, on which depended Brouage, reputed the fairest and most commodious haven in all the kingdom, and the chief staple for salt in all the southwest.[1426]

The sequel to such a course, it is true, must probably have been the erection of the southwest of France into an independent state. Such a result, looking at the France of today, is repugnant to our feelings. But we must look at things as they were then and judge accordingly and without prejudice. In the first place, it is to be remembered that in BÉarn there was already the nucleus of such a state to build upon; and secondly that Guyenne and Gascony for centuries had been possessions of another sovereignty, and that their attachment to France was barely over a century old. In the sixteenth century it was impossible to divorce religion from politics and the only solution was the separation of those which disagreed on matters of religion, as the division between the Protestant Dutch and the Catholic Flemish provinces in 1578-79 proves. The Peace of Augsburg had laid down the principle cujus regio, ejus religio, and no other policy could have prevailed in Germany at that time. But France was trying to make a monarchy, institutionally and necessarily Catholic, adapt itself to two religions, which could not be done as long as politics and religion, church and state, were united. Even after twenty-eight years more of struggle, neither the trial and experience of all those years nor the genius of Henry IV ever made the Edict of Nantes anything more than a modus vivendi which first proved intolerable to the Huguenots because of their own political ambitions, and finally to the monarchy of Louis XIV, whose motto was as truly: “Un roi, une loi, une foi” as it was “l’État, c’est moi.” The French monarchy in the nature of things, in the sixteenth century, could not be one-half Catholic and one-half Protestant, any more than the United States, as Lincoln said, could exist one-half slave and one-half free. What France would have lost by the creation of an independent state in the southwest would have been compensated for by other gains in other ways. Such a state in southwest Europe would have been an effective agency for peace, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It not only would have relieved its Catholic neighbors of the religious dissidents within their borders; it would have been a checkmate upon the undue aggrandizement of either France or Spain, operating like Holland and Switzerland as a buffer state and for the maintenance of the balance of power. The Spanish marriages of France in the next century probably never would have been, with their attendant train of dynastic and territorial complications during the reign of Louis XIV. The Grand Monarque perhaps never would have conceived the thought of browbeating the rest of Europe, and certainly never would have been able to carry the idea out to the extent he did.

In abandoning his original plan in January, 1570, Coligny not merely altered the immediate future of France; perhaps he changed its destiny for centuries to come. Instead of securing peace and security for the Huguenots by cutting the Gordian knot and establishing an independent Huguenot state, with BÉarn as its cornerstone, he threw the solution of the question back upon France. He had dreamed of a Huguenot France beyond sea. Why not one at home? Instead Coligny had become possessed with the idea that neither the King nor his ministers would seriously think of peace as long as the war could be kept confined to provinces remote from Paris and therefore, in order to force the hand of the King, it was necessary to force war upon him in the very heart of the kingdom. In other words, he conceived a new design, namely, to throw the war into the center of France once more, to march upon Paris, and, before its gates, dictate the terms he desired.

In pursuance of this new policy, the army of the admiral and the viscounts, with Montgomery, moved up the Garonne. Toulouse was invested for a month (January 22-February 20, 1570), as we have seen, without success and the country fearfully wasted.[1427] Want of provisions for men and horses at the end of this time compelled the host to move toward Carcassonne and MontrÉal.[1428] As the country between Montpellier and Avignon was almost totally in control of the Huguenots, Coligny soon moved thither, whence he followed up the right bank of the Rhone to Vivarais and Forez. Illness overtook him here and he was in great danger.[1429] For a time it seemed certain that fate would call Louis of Nassau who had joined him from Orange, to the leadership of the army.[1430] By the time of the admiral’s recovery, it was time for action if his design was to be executed, for things were in a greater state of doubt and uncertainty regarding the peace than ever.

The prospect of peace darkened as the winter began to break and preparations in both camps grew more active. In February the marshal CossÉ prepared to expel the Huguenots from La CharitÉ in order to deprive them of their only means of communication across the Loire River, by which assistance could be brought from Germany. This place had been one of the cities demanded from the government as pledge of good behavior, but the crown was determined not to yield in this particular. Queen Elizabeth had strongly assured the King that she had not directed nor licensed any of her subjects to carry arms or munitions to La Rochelle, but guarded herself against possible compromising evidence being discovered in future by adding that she “generally must permit merchants to resort indifferently to France.”[1431]

While the negotiations thus dragged on through March and April,[1432] a new element of excitement was introduced by the conduct of the reiters in the Catholic army. These adventurers, many of whom were Protestant in faith, tired of idleness and determined either to renew the war or secure their wages, on April 17 sent the King an address in which, in the same breath, they asserted their loyalty to Charles IX and their belief that those of the Reformed religion were only fighting for liberty of conscience and the preservation of their lives. Though guardedly put, reading between the lines, this memorial implied peace at once or immediate renewal of the war. Coincident with this manifesto the princes of Navarre and CondÉ joined in a note to the King declaring their resolution never to yield. To these causes of disaffection must be added the further one that many in the rank and file of the Huguenot party believed that the Protestant leaders were seeking to serve their own ends more than the common good; and accused them of being more anxious for the preservation of their privileges than for the free exercise of religion.

Matters continued thus to hang fire for several weeks. The King went to Mont St. Michel in the middle of May to keep the feast of Corpus Christi there, where, while professing his desire to conclude the peace, Charles IX nevertheless imposed a tax of 60,000 francs monthly upon those who had failed to bear arms in the late conflict. At the same time there was a large exodus of nobles from the court, many gentlemen, weary of long service in arms, soliciting and securing leave to retire. The talk of peace, too, continued to be current in the court,[1433] although Charles IX’s secret dealings with Montluc, the alienation of 50,000 Écus de rente of the property of the church,[1434] and the fact that the marshal CossÉ at this same time advanced out of Orleans with 2,000 horse and 4,000 French footmen and was soon joined by 8,000 Swiss and 30 companies of men-at-arms belied this.

Montluc had been on the point of resigning his commission for months past on account of the friction with Damville, but repented when there was prospect of the liberal marshal CossÉ succeeding him, fearing lest, with another such as Damville, the Catholic cause throughout the south would be ruined.[1435] He still clung to the hope of seeing BÉarn conquered notwithstanding Terride’s failure, and in June, 1570, the opportunity seemed to have come. With the aim of diverting the war from the Ile-de-France, and throwing it into the provinces once more—the farther the better—Charles IX grasped at a new expedition against BÉarn. Montluc was given the commission.[1436] Notwithstanding his years and his infirmity and the penury of the government, which had neither munitions nor money to spare, Montluc managed to raise a considerable force.[1437]

He had resolved to besiege the little fortified town of Rabastens, near Tarbes, which he had chosen as the point of attack because he could draw upon Gascony for supplies from this place more easily than by beginning at St. Severs, which bordered on the Landes, “a country only fruitful in sands.”[1438] But the expedition came to an untimely end. In an unguarded moment Montluc exposed himself and “a harquebus-shot clapt into his face” with such force as to break his whole visage in, so that the cheek-bones were taken out in splinters. The town was taken, nevertheless. How it suffered may be read in the words of him who meted out its punishment.

My Lieutenant, who had marcht on the one hand of me when I went on to the Assault ... came to see if I was dead, and said to me: “Sir, cheer up your spirits, and rejoyce, we have entred the Castle, and the Soldiers are laying about them, who put all to the sword; and assure your self we will revenge your wound.” I then said to him, “Praised be God that I see the Victory ours before I dye. I now care not for death. I beseech you return back, and as you have ever been my friend, so now do me that act of friendship not to suffer so much as one man to escape with life.” Whereupon he immediately returned and all my servants went along with him, so that I had no body left with me but two Pages, Monsieur de Las, and the Chirurgeon. They would fain have sav’d the Minister, and the Governor, whose name was Captain Ladon, to have hang’d them before my Lodging, but the Soldiers took them from those who had them in their custody, whom they had also like to have kill’d for offring to save them, and cut them in a thousand pieces. They made also fifty or threescore to leap from the high Tower into the Moat, which were there all drown’d. There were two only saved who were hid, and such there were who offer’d four thousand Crowns to save their lives, but not a man of ours would hearken to any Ransom; and most of the women were kill’d who also did us a great deal of mischief with throwing stones. There was found within a Spanish Merchant whom the Enemy had kept prisoner there, and another Catholick Merchant also, who were both saved; and these were all that were left alive of the men that we found in the place, namely the two that some one help’t away, and the two Catholick Merchants. Do not think, you who shall read this Book, that I caused this slaughter to be made so much out of revenge for the wound I had received, as to strike terror into the Country, that they might not dare to make head against our Army. And in my opinion all Souldiers in the beginning of a Conquest ought to proceed after that manner, with such as are so impudent as to abide Canon; he must bar his ears to all Capitulation and Composition, if he do not see great difficulties in his Enterprize, and that his Enemy have put him to great trouble in making a Breach. And as severity (call it cruelty if you please) is requisite in case of a resolute opposition, so on the other side mercy is very commendable, and fit, if you see that they in good time surrender to your discretion.[1439]

Since his assumption of the command at La Rochelle La Noue had displayed an energy that drove the enemy to despair. On land and on sea he became a terror to them. Sometimes it was by arresting the King’s galleys and bringing them as prizes to La Rochelle or Brouage;[1440] sometimes it was by driving them out, as at Rochefort, by digging a trench which poured waters waist deep down upon them; sometimes it was by battle in the open field. La Noue outmatched Puygaillard at every point, notwithstanding that his antagonist had the King’s picked troops. In the plain of Ste. Gemme, near LuÇon, their armies clashed in a fierce, stubbornly fought engagement. Nearly all the captains of his enemy’s two regiments and 500 arquebusiers were killed and as many more taken prisoner. The brilliant captain at last won, although he was so badly injured by an arquebus shot in the left arm that amputation was necessary. Yet in the hour of his own intense suffering he magnanimously lamented “the death of so many brave gentlemen.”[1441]

Much more decisive than this engagement, however, was Coligny’s action. The admiral had been lingering at Montbrison in Auvergne during May for the purpose of guarding the upper Loire.[1442] Alarmed by the formidable army under the marshal CossÉ, Coligny now determined to strike suddenly and hard in order to preserve La CharitÉ. This resolution precipitated the battle of Arnay-le-Duc on June 15, 1570.[1443] The result of this victory was startling. The government capitulated almost at once. All the essential terms of peace had been thrashed over during the spring and in less than a week after the battle Charles IX held in his hands the articles of pacification demanded by the Huguenots, chiefly stipulating for the free exercise of religion within three towns in every province and at Charenton, amnesty for the past and restitution of offices and estates. But the crown flatly refused the right within ten miles of Paris, or even for Protestant noblemen attending court in their own chambers and offered two towns in each province instead of three. When this was refused it was finally settled to adopt August 1, 1570, as an annus normalis, and permit Calvinist worship to be held in all towns in the possession of the Huguenots on that date. The two points of contention still unsettled were the payment of the reiters and determination of the surety-towns. The government at first proposed that the payment of the reiters be equally apportioned between the subjects of both religions, but finally shouldered the burden. As to the surety-towns—the most important point of all as far as practical politics was concerned—great difficulty was experienced before agreement was made. The King at first offered to yield La Rochelle, AngoulÊme, and Montauban, and to trade Perpignan or Lansac for La CharitÉ.[1444] Later, AngoulÊme was withdrawn and Cognac substituted, to the displeasure of the Huguenots, and La CharitÉ definitely yielded. As to other matters, namely, restitution of honors, offices, estates, privileges, equality of justice, amnesty, release of prisoners, and the like, these of course were provided for, and Protestant nobles enjoying “high justice” were to be permitted to enjoy free exercise of the Calvinist faith, including baptism in their houses, for their families, and all others in their dependence,[1445] an evidence that the feudal element in the Huguenot party was more considered than the bourgeoisie.[1446]

The papal nuncio, understanding that the Huguenots had demanded the exercise of their religion in the counties of Verre and Avignon, which belonged to the Pope, declared that no peace could be made with those who were outside of the church.[1447] At the same time the Spanish ambassador, being informed that it was part of the Huguenot programme to secure the restitution of William of Orange and his brother Louis of Nassau to their French possessions, also protested warmly against the peace. Spain offered direct assistance to France of men and money, and the city of Paris and the clergy offered to maintain the war at their own expense for eight months longer. But these protests were ineffectual. The Spanish ambassador’s mouth was stopped by the rejoinder that the French King had as much right to make a treaty of peace with his subjects as Philip of Spain had to make terms with the Moriscos,[1448] and so, though apprehensive of French and German Protestant assistance being given to Orange and fearful of an attack upon Franche ComtÉ, the Spanish ambassador was forced to be content with the promise of France that no hostility was intended or would be permitted in France toward Spain.

The Peace of St. Germain was the broadest and most substantial body of privileges yet secured by the French Protestants. Antedating the Edict of Nantes by twenty-eight years, it might have been as great and as permanent an instrument as the latter, if the ambition of the Guises and the intervention of Spain in French affairs had not overthrown it. France itself, government and people, was tired of ten years of strife and disposed to peace. The economic interests of the country were anxious for peace. Only zealots for the religion and those who sought to fish in troubled waters reprobated the terms of St. Germain and sought to continue the struggle. It is true that mutual suspicion still prevailed. Some of the Huguenots anticipated new encroachments again, destructive of the peace, and that the King only aimed to disarm the Protestants in order to overwhelm them later. But time, in all probability, would have qualified this feeling. Religion, unless artificially exaggerated, had ceased to be the primary issue of France by 1570. The real issue was Spain. For all parties alike in France had begun to chafe because of the power acquired by foreign military influences, especially that of Philip—a feeling which ultimately was destined to unite the country on the basis of a national patriotism and embolden Henry of Navarre to expel the Spaniard and establish the Bourbon throne on a truly national basis.

An incident which took place at the court in mid-July, when the terms of peace were under consideration, illustrates this all but universal hatred of Spain. One day the Spanish ambassador entered the King’s chamber for audience. Soon afterward the marshal Tavannes came in, who was somewhat deaf and accustomed to speak in a loud voice. Perceiving the ambassador he gruffly remarked in a voice so audible as to be heard by Alava:

These Spaniards would do better to govern their own members and not interfere by trying to govern other people’s countries. For I well know that the Spaniards have no wish but to foment civil wars, so that both one party and the other may be weakened and they themselves become stronger than both. For my own part, I would rather see a hundred white capes [the Huguenot costume] than one red cross [the device the Spaniards wore]; because, after all, the first are our brethren and our kindred, while the latter are the natural enemies of our country.[1449]

It was an opportune time for France to undertake an anti-Spanish policy, and it was soon predicted that she would follow such a course.[1450] Aside from the discomfiture of the Guises owing to the peace, a condition which peculiarly discountenanced the cardinal of Lorraine, the duke of Guise was in disgrace also. For he was discovered to have made overtures of marriage to Madame Marguerite, the King’s sister, and the lady herself for whom a Portuguese match was being considered as a blow to Spain, was reputed to have expressed a preference rather to stay in France than “to eat figs in Portugal.” Guise, when the discovery was made that he had raised his eyes to the princess, hastily attempted to divert suspicion by marrying the princess of Porcien. But the episode injured the influence of the Guises, and brought Montmorency forward as the man of the hour.[1451]

Under the new rÉgime, the government set about carrying out the terms of pacification, enforcement of which chiefly depended upon the upright and just conduct of the four marshals.[1452] By the end of September the camps were wholly broken up and the reiters either over or on their way across the frontier.[1453] To be sure, radical Protestants continued to complain of infractions of the edict.[1454] But the one serious infraction of the edict was in the fifteenth article, providing that all scholars, the sick and the poor, should be received in the universities, schools, and hospitals without difference or distinction on account of religion. The Catholic party, in the hope of abridging the development of the competing religion soon persuaded the King to nullify this provision. In compliance with a petition praying that the crown would forbid any of the Reformed religion from holding any post of authority in the University of Paris, and also that the university authorities might have power to search for and seize all heretical books, Charles IX on October 8, 1570, issued a proclamation forbidding any Calvinist from holding any office or teaching in the University of Paris and giving the authorities thereof the right of search for heretical books.[1455] On November 20, this was followed by a more sweeping decree forbidding any persons from keeping schools or holding office in any college, or lecturing on any art or science in public or in private unless recognized and approved by the Roman church.[1456] Nevertheless, these petitions, complaining of infractions of the edict, were more smoke than fire. The only internal issue of great importance was an economic one.

Apart from the destructiveness of the war, nature again dealt hardly with France in this year. There were heavy rains over all Europe which either rotted the grain in the fields or washed it out. A great inundation of the Seine occurred on June 2, 1570, and the plague began to grow more virulent once more.[1457] There was a certain amount of reason in the demand for a new session of the Estates to consider the economic distress of France, but the King was wise in refusing the request, for in event of its meeting, the enemies of Spain would have been sure to endeavor to fan the ashes of the late civil war into flames again. As a solace to those demanding economic relief Charles IX promised to abolish sundry superfluous offices and to tax the nobles instead of the commons for the relief of his debts which amounted to 37,000,000 francs. An earnest of this intention is manifest in an ordinance requiring parish wardens to keep accounts and to make a declaration of the revenue of their churches and to send this information to the royal bailiffs. Every parish was forced to obey this edict, which was a novelty indeed. But the parish authorities took advantage of the situation and not merely rendered an account of their incomes, but also gave the King a minute account of the ruin they had suffered at the hands of the Huguenots. The bailiffs received these declarations and sent them to the Privy Council of the King, where the evidence was reviewed and every church taxed accordingly. The churches which had been burned by the Protestants were lightly taxed, and those which were found to be incapable of payment were authorized to sell their possessions, their vessels, jewels, or lands, or else impose a tax on the parish.[1458]

But the thrifty bourgeoisie of France were too lucrative a source of income for the King to keep his promise not to tax them more. In March, 1571, an edict was issued providing that bolts of woolen cloth should be sealed with a leaden seal before sale, and that each bolt should be taxed 3 francs, 4 deniers. The new impost, which was very unpopular, was ascribed to the Italian influence at court.[1459]