ion to the king.]

Meanwhile, the admiral, whose power had never been so great as it now was,
exhibited the utmost anxiety to avert, if possible, any further effusion
of blood. Under his auspices a petition was drawn up in the name of the
Queen of Navarre, and the Princes, Seigneurs, Chevaliers, and gentlemen
composing the Protestant army. A messenger was sent to the Duke of Anjou
to request a passport for the deputies who were to carry it to the court.
But the duke was unwilling to terminate a war in which he had (whether
deservedly or not) acquired so much reputation, and reluctant to be forced
to resume the place of a subject near a brother whose capricious and
jealous humor he had already experienced. He therefore either refused or
delayed compliance with the admiral's demand.[698] Coligny succeeded,
however, in forwarding the document to his cousin Francis, Marshal of
Montmorency--a nobleman who, although he had not taken up arms with the
Huguenots, virtually maintained, on his estates near Paris, a neutrality
which, from the suspicion it excited, was not without its perils.
Montmorency laid the petition before Catharine and the king.

[Sidenote: The single purpose of the Huguenots.]

The voluminous state papers of the period would possess little claim to
our attention, were it not for the singleness of purpose which they
exhibit as animating the patriotic party through a long succession of
bloody wars. The Huguenots were no rebels seeking to undermine the
authority of the crown, no obstinate democrats striving to carry into
execution an impracticable scheme of government,[699] no partisans
struggling to supplant a rival faction. They were not turbulent lovers of
change. They had for their leaders princes and nobles with interests all
on the side of the maintenance of order, men whose wealth was wasted,
whose magnificent palaces were plundered of their rich contents,[700]
whose lives, with the lives of their wives and children, were jeoparded in
times of civil commotion. Even the unauthorized usurpations of the
foreigners from Lorraine[701] would not have been sufficient to move the
greater part of them to a resort to the sword. Their one purpose, the sole
object which they could not renounce, was the securing of religious
liberty. The Guises--even that cruel and cowardly cardinal with hands
dripping with the blood of the martyrs of a score of years--were nothing
to them, except as impersonations of the spirit of