toleration that had been vouchsafed to the Protestants.[428] All this may
have been false; but, if false, it was invested with a wonderful
verisimilitude, and to Huguenots and Papists it had, so far as their
actions were concerned, all the effect of truth. At all events the
promises of the king could not be trusted. Had he not been promising,
again and again, for four years? Had not every restrictive ordinance,
every interpretation of the Edict of Amboise, every palpable infringement
upon its spirit, if not upon its letter, been prefaced by a declaration of
Charles's intention to maintain the edict inviolate? In the words of an
indignant contemporary, "the very name of the edict was employed to
destroy the edict itself."[429]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Huguenot attempts at colonization in Florida.]

The Huguenot expeditions to Florida have been so well sketched
by Bancroft and Parkman, and so fully set forth by their
latest historian, M. Paul Gaffarel, that I need not speak of
them in detail. In fact, they belong more intimately to
American than to French history. They owed their origin to the
enlightened patriotism of Coligny, who was not less desirous,
as a Huguenot, to provide a safe refuge for his fellow
Protestants, than anxious, as High Admiral of France, to
secure for his native country such commercial resources as it
had never enjoyed. "I am in my house," he wrote in 1565,
"studying new measures by which we may traffic and make profit
in foreign parts. I hope shortly to bring it to pass that we
shall have the best trade in Christendom." (Gaffarel, Histoire
de la Floride francaise, Paris, 1875, pp. 45, 46). But,
although the project of Huguenot emigration was conceived in
the brain of the great Protestant leader, apparently it was
heartily approved by Catharine de' Medici and her son. They
certainly were not averse to be relieved of the presence of as
many as possible of those whom their religious views, and,
still more, their political tendencies, rendered objects of
suspicion. "If wishing were in order," Catharine (Letter to
Forquevaulx, March 17, 1566, Gaffarel, 428) plainly told the
Spanish ambassador, on one occasion, "I would wish that all
the Huguenots were in those regions" ("si c'estoit soueter, ie
voudrois que touts les Huguenots fussent en