e had awakened from the sleep
of ages. The doctrines of the Reformation were being embraced by the
masses. It was impossible to repress the impulse to confess with the
mouth[865] what was believed in the heart. At Rouen, the earnest request
of the authorities, seconded by the prudent advice of the ministers,
might prevail upon the Protestant community still to be content with an
unostentatious and almost private worship, upon promise of connivance on
the part of the Parliament of Normandy. But Caen, St. Lo, and Dieppe
witnessed great public assemblies,[866] and Central and Southern France
copied the example of Normandy. The time for secret gatherings and a
timid worship had gone by. They were no longer in question. "When cities
and almost entire provinces had embraced the faith of the reformers," a
recent historian has well remarked,[867] "secret assemblies became an
impossibility. A whole people cannot shut themselves up in forests and
in caverns to invoke their God. From whom would they hide? From
themselves? The very idea is absurd."

[Sidenote: Pamphlets against the usurpers.]

[Sidenote: The queen mother consults La Planche.]

The political ferment was not less active than the religious. The
pamphlets and the representations made by the emissaries of the Guises
to foreign powers, in which the movement at Amboise was branded as a
conspiracy directed against the king and the royal authority, called
forth a host of replies vindicating the _political_ Huguenots, and
setting their project in its true light, as an effort to overthrow the
intolerable usurpation of the Guises. The tyrants were no match for the
patriots in the use of the pen; but it fared ill with the author or
printer of these libels, when the strenuous efforts made to discover
them proved successful.[868] The politic Catharine de' Medici, fearing a
new and more dreadful outburst of the popular discontent, renewed her
hollow advances to the Protestant churches,[869] held a long
consultation with Louis Regnier de la Planche (the eminent historian,
whose profoundly philosophical and exact chronicle of this short reign
leaves us only disappointed that he confined his masterly investigations
to so limited a field) respecting the grounds of the existing
dissatisfaction,[870] and despatched Coligny to Normandy for the purpose
of finding a cure for the evil.

[Sidenote: Edict of Romorantin, May, 1560.]

[Sidenote: No abatement of rigor.]

The Guises, on th