ing, and their towns were the centre of the European press. The
later Renaissance, which achieved by monuments of solid work what
dilettantism had begun and interrupted in the Medicean age, was due to
them and to the refuge they provided for persecuted scholars. Their
government, imperfect and awkward in its forms, became the most
intelligent of the European governments. It gave the right of
citizenship to revolutionary principles, and handed on the torch when
the turn of England came. There the sects were reared which made this
country free; and there the expedition was fitted out, and the king
provided, by which the Whigs acquired their predominance. England,
America, France have been the most powerful agents of political
progress; but they were preceded by the Dutch. For it was by them
that the great transition was made, that religious change became
political change, that the Revolution was evolved from the
Reformation.

VIII

THE HUGUENOTS AND THE LEAGUE

WHEN THE religious frontiers were fixed in the rest of Europe, in
France, the most important state of all, they were still unsettled.
There the struggle was obstinate and sanguinary, and lasted more than
thirty years, ending, towards the close of the century, with the
triumph of the Crown over the nation, and the State over the Church.

Although the French had had at least one reformer before the
Reformation, and were prepared by the Gallican system for much
divergence from prevailing forms of medieval Catholicism; they
received the new ideas as an importation from Germany. In that shape,
as Lutheranism, they never became an important force in the country,
though there was, a time of comparative toleration, followed, after
1535, by the severities which at that time became usual in Europe.
The number of victims in the last years of Francis I is supposed to
have been eighty-five or a little more. Luther, in his life and
thought, presented so many characteristics of the exclusively German
type as to repel the French, who, during many years of that
generation, were at war with Germany. After his death, the first man
among the reformers was a Frenchman, and the system as he recast it
was more congenial. Calvinism possessed the important faculty of
self-government, whilst Lutheranism required to be sustained by the
civil power. For these reasons the Calvinistic doctrines obtained a
far more favourable hearing, and it is in that shape only that the
Refo