on of the
Papacy within very strictly defined limits, to abolish ultramontanism,
and to develop the Gallican theory of Church and State which French
divines had produced at the reforming councils of the fifteenth
century. As the clergy were subject to a Power which had encouraged
extermination, they aimed at the supremacy of the secular order, of
the lawyer over the priest, and of the State over the Church. They
were the most intelligent advocates of the modern state in relation to
society. For them, the representative of the State was the crown, and
they did their utmost to raise it above the restraining forces. For
the purpose that animated them the sole resource was the monarchy; and
it is they who terminated the wars of religion, the League, and the
Revolution, and prepared the great period of the Bourbon kings. Their
ideas survive, and are familiar to the later world in the classic
History of Thuanus.

The survivors closed their ranks and rapidly established a system of
self-government, which sought safety in its own organisation, not in
the protection of the crown. The intense conservatism of the early
Protestants was already giving way in the Netherlands, and it now made
way in France for the theory of resistance. A number of books
appeared, asserting the inalienable right of men to control the
authority by which they are governed, and more especially the right of
Frenchmen, just as, in the following century, Puritan writers claimed
a special prerogative in favour of Englishmen, as something distinct
from the rest of mankind. The most famous is the Vindiciae contra
Tyrannos, by Junius Brutus, generally attributed to Hubert Languet,
but written, as I believe, by Duplessis Mornay, a man eminent as a
party leader, who lost ground by entering on religious controversy.
As an adherent and even a friend of Henry of Navarre, he was moderate
in his language. This is the beginning of the literature of
revolution. But the Huguenots quickly restrained themselves, for the
same reason which, as we shall see, drove the Catholics of the League
to the extremity of violence and tyrannicide. The cause of these
dissimilar consequences was the problem of succession to the crown.
Henry III had no children, and the future of the Valois dynasty rested
on his only brother, the duke of Anjou, formerly of Alencon, the
favoured and apparent suitor of Elizabeth, who by his perfidy and
incompetence lost the government of the Nethe