idenote: Conde favors and Coligny opposes the peace.]

The Huguenots gained by this peace all their immediate demands, and so far
the edict might be deemed satisfactory. But what better security had they
for its observance more than they had had for the observance of that which
had preceded it? Coligny, prudent and far-sighted, had shown himself as
averse to concluding it without sufficient guarantees for its faithful
execution, as he had been opposed to beginning the war a half-year before.
The peace, he urged, was intended by the court only as a means of saving
Chartres, and of afterward overwhelming the reformers;[506] and he
attempted to prove his assertions by the signal instances of bad faith
which had provoked the recourse to arms. But Conde was impatient. If we
may believe Agrippa d'Aubigne, his old love of pleasure was not without
its influence;[507] but he covered his true motives under the specious
pretext afforded him by the Huguenot nobles, who, fatigued with the
incessant toils of the campaign, reduced to straits by a warfare which
they had carried on at their own expense, and longing to revisit homes
which had been repeatedly threatened with desolation, had abandoned their
standards and scattered to their respective provinces at the first mention
of peace.[508] Francois de la Noue, more charitable to the prince, regards
the universal desire for peace, without much concern respecting its
conditions, as the wild blast of a hurricane which the Huguenot captains
could not resist if they would.[509] When whole cornets of cavalry started
without leave, before the siege of Chartres was actually raised, what
could generals, deserted by volunteers who had come of their own accord
and had served for six months without pay, expect to accomplish?

[Sidenote: Was the court sincere?]

[Sidenote: A treacherous plot detected. The king indignant.]

Was the peace of Longjumeau--"the patched-up peace," or "the short peace,"
as it was called; that "wicked little peace," as La Noue styles it[510]--a
compact treacherously entered into by the court? This is the old, but
constantly recurring question respecting every principal event of this
unhappy period; and it is one that rarely admits of an easy or a simple
answer. So far as the persons who had been chiefly instrumental in
forwarding the negotiations which ended in the peace of Longjumeau were
concerned, they were Chancellor L'Hospital and the Bishops of Orleans and
Limoge