d to forebode a refusal. Henry
summoned to the Louvre deputies from all the chambers. "What I have
done," he said to them, "is for the good of peace. I have made it
abroad; I wish to make it at home. Necessity forced me to this decree.
They who would prevent it from passing would have war. You see me in my
closet. I speak to you, not in royal robe, or with sword and cape, as
my predecessors did, nor as a prince receiving an embassy, but as a
father of a family in his doublet conversing familiarly with his
children. It is said that I am minded to favor them of the religion;
there is a mind to entertain some mistrust of me. . . . I know that
cabals have been got up in the Parliament, that seditious preachers have
been set on. . . . The preachers utter words by way of doctrine for
to build up rather than pull down sedition. That is the road formerly,
taken to the making of barricades, and to proceeding by degrees to the
parricide of the late king. I will cut the roots of all these factions;
I will make short work of those who foment them. I have scaled the
walls of cities; you may be sure I shall scale barricades. You must
consider that what I am doing is for a good purpose, and let my past
behavior go bail for it."

Parliaments and Protestants, all saw that they had to do not only with a
strong-willed king, but with a judicious and clearsighted man, a true
French patriot, who was sincerely concerned for the public interest, and
who had won his spurs in the art of governing parties by making for each
its own place in the state. It was scarcely five years ago that the king
who was now publishing the edict of Nantes had become a Catholic; the
Parliaments enregistered the decree. The Protestant malcontents resigned
themselves to the necessity of being content with it. Whatever their
imperfections and the objections that might be raised to them, the peace
of Vervins and the edict of Narrtes were, amidst the obstacles and perils
encountered at every step by the government of Henry IV., the two most
timely and most beneficial acts in the world for France.

Four months after the conclusion of the treaty of Vervins, on the 13th of
September, 1598, Philip II. died at the Escurial, "prison, cloister, and
tomb all in one," as M. Rosseeuw St. Hilaire very well remarks [_Histoire
d'Espagne,_ t. x. pp. 335-363], situated eight leagues from Madrid.
Philip was so ill, and so cruelly racked by gout and fever, that it