es were still
intact at this epoch: one, the Duke of Sully, without engaging in
religious polemics, had persisted in abiding by the faith of his fathers,
in spite of his king's example and attempts to bring him over to the
Catholic faith: the other, Du Plessis-Mornay, had always striven, and was
continuing to strive, actively for the Protestant cause. These two
illustrious champions of the Reformed party were in agreement with the
new principles of national right, and with the intelligent instincts of
their people, whose confidence they deserved and seemed to possess.

But the passions, the usages, and the suspicions of the party were not
slow in reappearing. The Protestants were highly displeased to see the
Catholic worship and practices re-established in Bearn, whence Queen
Jeanne of Navarre had banished them; the rights of religious liberty were
not yet powerful enough with them to surmount their taste for exclusive
domination. As a guarantee for their safety, they had been put in
possession of several strong places in France; neither the edict of
Nantes nor its confirmation by Mary de' Medici appeared to them a
sufficient substitute for this guarantee; and they claimed its
continuance, which was granted them for five years. After Henry IV.'s
conversion to Catholicism, his European policy had no longer been
essentially Protestant; he had thrown out feelers and entered into
negotiations for Catholic alliances; and these, when the king's own
liberal and patriotic spirit was no longer there to see that they did not
sway his government, became objects of great suspicion and antipathy to
the Protestants. Henry had constantly and to good purpose striven
against the spirit of religious faction and civil war; anxious, after his
death, about their liberty and their political importance, the Reformers
reassumed a blind confidence in their own strength, and a hope of forming
a small special state in the midst of the great national state. Their
provincial assemblies and their national synods were, from 1611 to 1621,
effective promoters of this tendency, which before long became a formal
and organized design; at Saumur, at Tonneins, at Privas, at Grenoble, at
Loudun, at La Rochelle, the language, the movements, and the acts of the
party took more and more the character of armed resistance, and, ere
long, of civil war; the leaders, old and new.

Duke Henry of Rohan as well as the Duke of Bouillon, the Marquis of La
Force as