power
independent of those of the countr;y; or, in other words, the means of
taking resolutions contrary to those of the mass of the nation, and of
upholding them by revolt. All they wanted was a Huguenot stadtholder to
oppose to the King of France, and they were looking out for one."

Henry IV. did not delude himself as to the tendency of such organization
amongst those of his late party. "He rebuffed very sternly (and
wisely)," says L'Estoile, "those who spoke to him of it. 'As for a
protector,' he told them, 'he would have them to understand that there
was no other protector in France but himself for one side or the other;
the first man who should be so daring as to assume the title would do so
at the risk of his life; he might be quite certain of that.'" Had Henry
IV. been permitted to read the secrets of a not so very distant future,
he might have told the Huguenots of his day that the time was not so far
off when their pretension to political organization and to the formation
of a state within the state, would compromise their religious liberty and
furnish the absolute government of Louis XIV. with excuses for abolishing
the protective edict which Henry IV.'s sympathy was on the point of
granting them, and which, so far as its purely religious provisions went,
was duly respected by the sagacity of Cardinal Richelieu.

After his conversion to Catholicism, and during the whole of his
reign, it was one of Henry IV.'s constant anxieties to show himself
well-disposed towards his old friends, and to do for them all he could do
without compromising the public peace in France, or abdicating in his own
person the authority he needed to maintain order and peace. Some of the
edicts published by his predecessors during the intervals of civil war,
notably the edict of Poitiers issued by Henry III., had granted the
Protestants free exercise of their worship in the castles of the
Calvinistic lords who had jurisdiction, to the number of thirty-five
hundred, and in the faubourgs of one town or borough of each bailiwick of
the realm, except the bailiwick of Paris. Further, the holding of
properties and heritages, union by marriage with Catholics, and the
admission of Protestants to the employments, offices, and dignities of
the realm, were recognized by this edict. These rights, in black and
white, had often been violated by the different authorities, or suspended
during the wars; Henry IV. maintained them or put them in fo