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Instead of glorying, in their crime, the King and his mother now assumed a tone of compunction, and averred that the deed had been unpremeditated; that it had been the result of a panic or an ecstasy of fear inspired by the suddenly discovered designs of the Huguenots; and that, in the instinct of self-preservation, the King, with his family and immediate friends, had plunged into a crime which they now bitterly lamented.
Upon the margin of one of these letters was written: "For four lines in a man's handwriting he might be criminally tried." Farther on were scattered denunciations against the Huguenots; the republican plans they had drawn up; the division of France into departments under the annual dictatorship of a chief.
"Spain and France are nearly at open war, and Monsieur d'Olivares has not hesitated to offer the assistance of his Catholic Majesty to the Huguenots." "Very good. I will consider it," said the King. "Leave me." "Sire, the States-General of Catalonia are in a dilemma. The troops from Aragon march against them." "We shall see. I will come to a decision in a quarter of an hour," answered Louis XIII.
Elizabeth's second Parliament met at a time when the downfall of the Huguenots to whom England had furnished assistance, the failure of a plot entered into by the nephews of Cardinal Pole for the overthrow of Elizabeth's government, and the reports from the ecclesiastical commissioners and the bishops, showing as they did that contempt for the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity was still strong, made it necessary to undertake more repressive measures against the Catholics.
In this cold-blooded way, too, did his Catholic Majesty order the execution of some thousand Huguenots additionally, in order more fully to carry out his royal brother's plans; yet Philip could write of himself, "that all the world recognized the gentleness of his nature and the mildness of his intentions."
The persecutions of the Huguenots, which he witnessed in his early youth, and the solemn injunctions of his father to revenge their wrongs, rendered him one of the most zealous and uncompromising reformers under Henri IV. He died at Geneva on the 20th of April 1630, aged eighty years, and was buried in the cloisters of St. Pierre.
He energetically aided Louis XIII in organizing and equipping what proved to be the best army in Europe. Two factions in the state aroused the cardinal's ire one the Huguenots, and the other the nobles for both threatened the autocracy which he was bent upon erecting. Both factions suffered defeat and humiliation at his hands.
The summer passed quietly at Laville. The tales of massacre and outrage, that came from all parts of France, filled them with horror and indignation; but in their own neighbourhood, all was quiet. Rochelle had refused to open her gates to the royal troops and, as in all that district the Huguenots were too numerous to be interfered with by their neighbours, the quiet was unbroken.
Other children might have asked for a pen but to write against the Huguenots evinced a deeper feeling and a wider association of ideas, indicating the future polemic. Some of these facts, we conceive, afford decisive evidence of that instinct in genius, that primary quality of mind, sometimes called organization, which has inflamed a war of words by an equivocal term.
But he had been so brutally used by the husband, that he did not make old bones, and the fair Limeuil was left a widow in her springtime. In spite of his misdeeds the advocate was not searched after. He was cunning enough eventually to get included in the number of those conspirators who were not prosecuted, and returned to the Huguenots, for whom he worked hard in Germany.
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