ee that the political issue was superior to the military.
The English fleet outside was helpless to assist, and the starving
town yielded to the clerical warrior. Many thousands had perished,
fighting, as they averred, for toleration, in reality for
predominance.

The fall of Rochelle was the end of political Protestantism in France
as it issued from the civil war; of the attempt to imitate that which
the League had done, and to build up a confederation too strong for
the State. But the strictly religious privileges conceded thirty
years earlier were immediately renewed, and they were faithfully
observed. What Richelieu resisted implacably was disintegration, not
Calvinism. He had no difficulty in tolerating religious dissent. He
would not tolerate political opposition. Richelieu was a bishop, a
cardinal, a practised writer of theological controversy, a
passionately resolved defender of the national unity, and of the
French patriotism, which the religious struggle had imperilled, but he
was not intolerant. Under him, and under his successor, the Sicilian
Cardinal Mazarin, the religion which had been thought so dangerous was
allowed to prosper, and the highest offices were crowded with
Huguenots. The rapid expansion of French power was largely due to
this policy. It was then that the French proved superior to the
Spaniards in war, and the long supremacy of Spain came to an end on
land half a century after it had terminated at sea. Several of the
marshals were Protestants, including Turenne, the most illustrious of
them all. The tolerant spirit of the ecclesiastical statesmen caused
the rise of France, and its decline followed the intolerance of Lewis
XIV.

Richelieu, if not deeply religious, was thoroughly a Churchman; but
his attitude towards Protestants separated him, on most fundamental
points, from the Spanish and Roman persecutors, and he differed
considerably from the great divines of the preceding generation.
He had just come to power when a book was published at Rome by
Sanctarelli renewing the theories of Bellarmin and Suarez, which had
excited the indignant resentment of the university and the Parliament.
Richelieu required the Paris Jesuits to renounce the doctrines which
their brethren proclaimed essential to orthodoxy. And they did what
he required of them, accepting, in France, the sentiments of France,
and protesting, at Rome, that they retained the sentiments of Rome.
They became the friend