at the French court, to
congratulate Charles the Ninth upon the restoration of peace, he found his
strongest reasons of hope for its permanence, next to the disposition and
the necessities of the king, in the royal "misliking toward the house of
Guise, who have been the nourishers of these wars,"[793] and in the
increase of the royal "favor to Montmorency, a chief worker of this peace,
who now carrieth the whole sway of the court, and is restored to the
government of Paris."[794]

At home and abroad, the peace was equally opposed by those who could not
have failed to be its warmest advocates had it been treacherously
designed. We have already seen that both Pope Pius the Fifth, and the King
of Spain insisted upon a continuance of the war, and offered augmented
assistance, in case the government would pledge itself to make no compact
with the heretical rebels. The pontiff especially was unremitting in his
persuasions and threats; denouncing the righteous judgment of God upon the
king who preferred personal advantage to the claims of religion, and
reminding him that the divine anger was wont to punish the sins of rulers
by taking away their kingdoms and giving them to others.[795] The project
of a massacre of Protestants, had it in reality been entertained by the
French court while adopting the peace, could scarcely have been kept so
profound a secret from the king and the pontiff who had long been urging a
resort to such measures, nor would Pius and Philip have been suffered
through ignorance to persist in so open a hostility to the compact which
was intended to render its execution feasible.

[Sidenote: The designs of Catharine de' Medici.]

If the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, as enacted on the fatal Sunday
of August, was not premeditated in the form it then assumed--if the peace
of St. Germain was not, as so many have imagined, a trick to overwhelm the
Huguenots taken unawares--are we, therefore, to believe that the idea of
such a deed of blood was as yet altogether foreign to the mind of
Catharine de' Medici? I dare not affirm that it was. On the contrary,
there is reason to believe that the conviction that she might some day
find herself in a position in which she could best free herself from
entanglement by some such means had long since lodged in her mind. It was
not a strange or repulsive notion to the careful student of the code of
morality laid down in "Il Principe." Alva had familiarized her with it,
an