aid off a debt of three hundred
millions in eight years.

These and other public services showed his humane nature and his
enlightened mind, until, after a glorious reign of twenty-one years, he
was cut off, in the prime of his life and in the midst of his
usefulness, by the assassin's dagger, May, 1610, in the fifty-eighth
year of his age,--the greatest of all the French kings,--leaving five
children by his second wife, Marie de Medicis, four of whom became kings
or queens.

But to consider particularly Henry's connection with the Huguenots. If
he deserted their ranks, he did not forget them. He gave them religious
toleration,--all they originally claimed. In 1598 was signed the
memorable edict of Nantes, by which the Protestants preserved their
churches, their schools, their consistories, and their synods; and they
retained as a guarantee several important cities and fortresses,--a sort
of _imperium in imperio_. They were made eligible to all offices. They
were not subjected to any grievous test-act. They enjoyed social and
political equality, as well as unrestricted religious liberty, except in
certain cities. They gained more than the Puritans did in the reign of
Charles II. They were not excluded from universities, nor degraded in
their social rank, nor annoyed by unjust burial laws. The two religions
were placed equally under the protection of the government. By this
edict the Huguenots gained all that they had struggled for.

Still, the abjuration of Henry IV. was a great calamity to them. They
lost their prestige; they were in a minority; they could count no longer
on the leadership of princes. They were deprived gradually of the
countenance of powerful nobles and all the potent influences of fashion;
and when a reaction against Calvinism took place in the seventeenth
century, the Huguenots had dwindled to a comparatively humble body of
unimportant people. They lost heart and men of rank to defend them when
the persecution of Richelieu overtook them in the next reign. They were
then unfit to contend successfully with that centralized monarchy of
which Henry IV. had laid the foundation, and which Richelieu cemented by
fraud and force. Louis XIV., educated by the Jesuits and always under
their influence, repealed the charter which Henry IV. had given them.
The persecution they suffered under Louis XIV. was more dreadful than
that they suffered under Charles IX., since they had neither arms, nor
organization, no