of civil
war. Beyond them, persecution was still legitimate. The power of the
Protestants was acknowledged, not the prerogative of conscience. The
Edict of Nantes was not one of those philosophical instruments which
breed unending consequences, growing from age to age, and modifying
the future more and more. It was a settlement, not a development.
This was the method chosen in order to evade resentment on the part of
Catholics and the weakening of the crown. To speak in general or
abstract terms of the sovereign conscience was to urge the contrast
between the Roman Inquisition and the spirit of early Christianity,
and to promote a breach with the Catholicism of Southern Europe. To
proclaim that the civil magistrate has no right to regulate belief was
to limit monarchy and to repel the Politiques, who were the
legislators of the day, and who attributed all power on earth to the
State, admitting a wise restraint, but no renunciation of right.

The plan adopted achieved the desired result. The Protestants enjoyed
the faculty of self-government, and their great writers and scholars
were free to influence opinion by their writings. While the stubborn
fixity of German Lutherans and Swiss Calvinists lifted them out of the
stream of actual history, French Protestantism, like English, was full
of growth and originality. The law of the new government was to raise
the Crown above parties, and the State above the nation. It was part
of the doctrine which Machiavelli revealed to the men of the
Renaissance. The Middle Ages had practised class government. The
interests dominant in society dominated the State, and employed it for
their own advantage. The territorial aristocracy, or the clergy,
legislated for themselves and controlled taxation. Venice, which was
a republic not of landowners but of shipowners, was the first to
revert to the ancient notion of the State acting for its own purposes,
bound to no interest, following the opinion of no majority. Venice
turned from the sea to the land, and became an Italian Power, in
obedience to no class, on public grounds only, regardless of other
influences. The French monarchy, as Henry restored it, was of
necessity raised above the contending parties, and was the organ of no
inspiration but its own. He dropped the states-general, which had
been turbulent and hostile, and carried out his measures in defiance
of the parliaments. That of Rouen refused for ten years to regist