e northern frontier.]

[Sidenote: Progress of the reformation at Cateau-Cambresis.]

For several years the Protestants in the northern provinces of France had
been busily communicating the religious views they had themselves embraced
to their neighbors in Artois, Flanders, and Brabant. This intercourse
became exceedingly close about the beginning of the year 1566; and its
result was a renunciation of the papal church and its worship, which was
participated in by such large numbers, and effected so instantaneously,
that the friends and the foes of the new movement were almost equally
surprised. The story of this sudden outburst of the reformatory spirit in
Valenciennes, Tournay, and other places, accompanied--as are all movements
that take a strong hold upon the popular feelings--with a certain amount
of lawlessness, which expended itself, however, upon inanimate images and
held sacred the lives and honor of men and women, has been well told in
the histories of the country whose fortunes it chiefly affected.[407] I
may be permitted, therefore, to pass over these indirect results of
Huguenot influence, and glance at the fortunes of a border town within the
present bounds of France, and closely connected with the history of France
in the sixteenth century, of which little or no notice has been taken in
this connection.[408] Cateau-Cambresis, famous for the treaty by which
Henry the Second bartered away extensive conquests for a few paltry places
that had fallen into the hands of the enemy, was, as its name--Chastel,
Chateau or Cateau--imports, a castle and a borough that had grown up about
it, both of them on lands belonging to the domain of Maximilian of Bergen,
Archbishop and Duke of Cambray, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. It
was smaller, but relatively far more important three hundred years ago
than at the present day. For several years a few "good burgesses," with
their families, had timidly studied the Holy Scriptures in secret,
restrained from making an open profession of their faith by the terrible
executions which they saw inflicted upon the Protestants in the
Netherlands. But, encouraged by the toleration prevailing in France, they
began to cross the frontier, and to frequent the Huguenot "assemblees" at
Crespy, Tupigny, and Chauny. The distance was not inconsiderable, and the
peril was great. The archbishop had not only written a letter, which was
read in every parish church, forbidding the singing of Marot'