intolerance and
persecution. Liberty to worship their God in good conscience was their
demand alike after defeats and after successes, under Louis de Bourbon or
under Gaspard de Coligny. They did, indeed, sympathize with the first
family of the blood, deprived of the position near the throne to which
immemorial custom entitled it--and what true Frenchman did not? But
Admiral Coligny, rather than the Prince of Conde, was the type of the
Huguenot of the sixteenth century--Coligny, the heroic figure that looms
up through the mist of the ages and from among the host of meaner men,
invested with all the attributes of essential greatness--pious, loyal,
truthful, brave, averse to war and bloodshed, slow to accept provocation,
resolute only in the purpose to secure for himself and his children the
most important among the inalienable prerogatives of manhood, the freedom
of professing and practising his religious faith.

The present petition differed little from its predecessors. It reiterated
the desire of the Huguenots for peace--a desire evidenced on so many
occasions, sometimes when prudence might have dictated a course opposite
to that which they adopted. The return they had received for their
moderation could be read in broken edicts, and in "pacifications" more
sanguinary than the wars they terminated. The Protestant princes and
gentlemen, therefore, entreated Charles "to make a declaration of his will
respecting the liberty of the exercise of the reformed religion in the
form of a solemn, perpetual, and irrevocable edict." They begged him "to
be pleased to grant universally to all his subjects, of whatever quality
or condition they might be, the free exercise of that religion in all the
cities, villages, hamlets, and other places of his kingdom, without any
exception, reservation, modification, or restriction as to persons, times,
or localities, with the necessary and requisite securities." True,
however, to the spirit of the age, which dreaded unbridled license of
opinion as much as it did the intolerance of the papal system, the
Huguenots were careful to preclude the "Libertines" from sheltering
themselves beneath this protection, by calling upon Charles to require of
all his subjects the profession of the one or the other religion[702]--so
far were even the most enlightened men of their country and period from
understanding what spirit they were of, so far were they from recognizing
the inevitable direction of the path