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Mary de' Medici, having been declared regent, lost no time about confirming, on the 22d of May, 1610, the edict of Nantes and proclaiming religious peace as the due of France. "We have nothing to do with the quarrels of the grandees," said the people of Paris; "we have no mind to be mixed up with them." Some of the preachers of repute and of the party's old leaders used the same language.
Yet it was then that he made the most fatal mistake of his life, the evil consequences of which pursued him to his death. He revoked the Edict of Nantes, which Henry IV. had granted, and which had secured religious toleration.
* The disasters of Nantes ought not to be lost to the republicans of Birmingham, Manchester, and other great commercial towns, where "men fall out they know not why;" and where their increasing wealth and prosperity are the best eulogiums on the constitution they attempt to undermine.
He accepted Prudhomme's lists, a million of victims, exactly. But the Loire, red with gore from Saumur to Nantes, in a line of eighteen leagues, made him wonder. Pécuchet in the same degree entertained doubts, and they began to distrust the historians. For some the Revolution is a Satanic event; others declare it to be a sublime exception.
It was not until the 30th of July that the fact that the prince had sailed from Nantes was known in London, and as late as the 8th of August, nearly three weeks after Charles first appeared on the coast, the fact of his landing was unknown to the authorities in Edinburgh.
In such a dull, sleepy town as Nantes, where there is nothing in particular going on, and where the people have little or nothing to talk about outside their own petty lives, such an experiment as this was naturally the subject of much talk. It was such a bold step, and, really, there was nothing else to talk about.
The failure of the well-known firm of Collinet at Nantes, caused by the events of 1814 which led to a sudden fall in colonial products, deprived them of twenty-four thousand francs which they had just deposited with that house. The arrival of their daughter-in-law was therefore welcome to them. Her pension of eight hundred francs was a handsome income at Pen-Hoel.
It is a tribute to his constancy that men chiefly remember this dark time by its spots of colour as when, at Nantes, he flung Our Lady's image into the Loire 'She is light enough: let her learn to swim! And when off St Andrews they pointed out to him the steeple of the kirk, the emaciated prisoner replied, 'Yes, I know it well: and I am fully persuaded, how weak that ever I now appear, that I shall not depart this life till that my tongue shall glorify His godly name in the same place. But this first apprenticeship to sorrow went deep into the man.
The stubborn university was last to give way, but when the doctors of theology learnt that Henry had touched for the king's evil and that many had been cured, they too were convinced. Paris, "well worth a mass," was wooed and won. The memorable Edict of Nantes established liberty of worship and political equality for the Protestants.
"The horrid prints, pamphlets, and caricatures," cried she, "daily exhibited under the very windows of the Tuileries, against His Majesty, the Queen, the Austrian party, and the Coblentz party, the constant thwarting of every plan, and these last horrors at Nantes, have so overwhelmed the King that he is nearly become a mere automaton. Daily and nightly execrations are howled in his ears.
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