Calais was never restored, and this without
the English government's having considered that it could make the matter
a motive for renewing the war. By the treaty with Spain, France was to
keep Metz, Toul, and Verdun, and have back Saint-Quentin, Le Catelet, and
Ham; but she was to restore to Spain or her allies a hundred and
eighty-nine places in Flanders, Piedmont, Tuscany, and Corsica. The
malcontents--for the absence of political liberty does not suppress
them entirely--raised their voices energetically against this last
treaty signed by the king, with the sole desire, it was supposed, of
obtaining the liberation of his two favorites, the Constable de
Montmorency and Marshal de Saint-Andre, who had been prisoners in Spain
since the defeat at Saint-Quentin. "Their ransom," it was said, "has
cost the kingdom more than that of Francis I." Guise himself said to
the king, "A stroke of your Majesty's pen costs more to France than
thirty years of war cost." Ever since that time the majority of
historians, even the most enlightened, have joined in the censure that
was general in the sixteenth century; but their opinion will not be
indorsed here; the places which France had won during the war, and which
she retained by the peace,--Metz, Toul, and Verdun on her frontier in
the north-east, facing the imperial or Spanish possessions, and Boulogne
and Calais on her coasts in the north-west, facing England,--were, as
regarded the integrity of the state and the security of the inhabitants,
of infinitely more importance than those which she gave up in Flanders
and Italy. The treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, too, marked the termination
of those wars of ambition and conquest which the Kings of France had
waged beyond the Alps an injudicious policy, which, for four reigns, had
crippled and wasted the resources of France in adventurous expeditions,
beyond the limits of her geographical position and her natural and
permanent interests.

More or less happily, the treaty of Cateau-Cambreis had regulated all
those questions of external policy which were burdensome to France; she
was once more at peace with her neighbors, and seemed to have nothing
more to do than to gather in the fruits thereof. But she had in her own
midst questions far more difficult of solution than those of her external
policy, and these perils from within were threatening her more seriously
than any from without. Since the death of Francis I., the religious
ferment h