king now repealed the edicts of toleration, and henceforth
prohibited his subjects, of whatever rank and in all parts of his
dominions, on pain of confiscation and death, from the exercise of any
other religious rites than those of the Roman Catholic Church. All
Protestant ministers were ordered to leave France within fifteen days.
Quiet and peaceable laymen were promised toleration until such time as God
should deign to bring them back to the true fold; and pardon was offered
to all who within twenty days should lay down their arms.[590] The second
edict deprived all Protestant magistrates of the offices they held,
reserving, however, to those who did not take part in the war, a certain
portion of their former revenues.[591]

In order to give greater solemnity to the transaction, Charles, clothed in
robes of state and with great pomp, repaired to the parliament house, to
be present at the publication of the new edicts, and with his own hands
threw into the fire and burned up the previous edicts of pacification.
"Thus did his Royal Highness of France," writes a contemporary German
pamphleteer with intense satisfaction, "as was seemly and becoming to a
Christian supreme magistrate, _pronounce sentence of death upon all
Calvinistic and other heresies_."[592]

[Sidenote: Impolicy of this course.]

Nothing devised by the papal party could have been better adapted to
further the Huguenot cause than the course it had adopted. The wholesale
proscription of their faith united the Protestants, and led every
able-bodied man to take up arms against a perfidious government, whose
disregard of treaties solemnly made was so shamefully paraded before the
world. "These edicts," admits the candid Castelnau, "only served to make
the whole party rise with greater expedition, and furnished the Prince of
Conde and the admiral with a handle to convince all the Protestant powers
that they were not persecuted for any disaffection to the government, but
purely for the sake of religion."[593]

[Sidenote: Attempts to make capital of the proscriptive measures.]

Efforts were not spared by the Guisard party to make capital abroad out of
the new proscriptive measures. Copies of the edicts, translated from the
French, were put into circulation beyond the Rhine, accompanied by a
memorial embodying the views presented by an envoy of Charles to some of
the Roman Catholic princes of the empire. The king herein justified
himself for his previous clem