een more iniquitously contrived or executed: his uncle Charles V.,
and his father Ferdinand, had made war on the Protestants, but they had
never been guilty of so cruel an act.[166] At that moment Maximilian was
seeking the crown of Poland for his son; and the events in France were a
weapon in his hands against his rival, Anjou. Even the Czar of Muscovy,
Ivan the Terrible, replying to his letters, protested that all Christian
princes must lament the barbarous and needless shedding of so much
innocent blood. It was not the rivalry of the moment that animated
Maximilian. His whole life proves him to have been an enemy of violence
and cruelty; and his celebrated letter to Schwendi, written long after,
shows that his judgment remained unchanged. It was the Catholic Emperor
who roused the Lutheran Elector of Saxony to something like resentment
of the butchery in France.[167]

For the Lutherans were not disposed to recognise the victims of Charles
IX. as martyrs for the Protestant cause. During the wars of religion
Lutheran auxiliaries were led by a Saxon prince, a margrave of Baden,
and other German magnates, to aid the Catholic forces in putting down
the heresy of Calvin. These feelings were so well known that the French
Government demanded of the Duke of Wirtemberg the surrender of the
Huguenots who had fled into his dominions.[168] Lutheran divines
flattered themselves at first with the belief that it was the
Calvinistic error, not the Protestant truth, that had invited and
received the blow.[169] The most influential of them, Andreae, declared
that the Huguenots were not martyrs but rebels, who had died not for
religion but sedition; and he bade the princes beware of the contagion
of their spirit, which had deluged other lands with blood. When
Elizabeth proposed a league for the defence of Protestantism, the North
German divines protested against an alliance with men whose crime was
not only religious error but blasphemous obstinacy, the root of many
dreadful heresies. The very proposal, they said, argued a disposition to
prefer human succour rather than the word of God.[170] When another
invitation came from Henry of Navarre, the famous divine Chemnitz
declared union with the disciples of Calvin a useless abomination.[171]

The very men whose own brethren had perished in France were not hearty
or unanimous in execrating the deed.[172] There were Huguenots who
thought that their party had brought ruin on itself, by provo