oyal
residence. On the 4th of August, 1564, the Reformed churches were
forbidden to hold synods and make collections of money, and their
ministers to quit their places of residence and to open schools. On the
12th of November, 1567, a king's ordinance interdicted the conferring of
judiciary offices on non-Catholics. In vain did Conde and Coligny cry
out loudly against these violations of the peace of Amboise; in vain, on
the 16th of August, 1563, at the moment of proclaiming the king's
majority, was an edict issued giving full and entire confirmation to the
edict of the 19th of March preceding, with the addition of prescriptions
favorable to the royal authority, as well as, at the same time, to the
maintenance of the public peace; scarcely any portion of these
prescriptions was observed; the credit of Chancellor de l'Hospital was
clearly very much on the decline; and, whilst the legal government was
thus falling to pieces or languishing away, Gaspard de Tavannes, a proved
soldier and royalist, who, however, was not yet marshal of France, was
beginning to organize, under the name of Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit,
a secret society intended to renew the civil war "if it happened that
occasion should offer for repressing and chastising them of the religion
called Reformed." It was the League in its cradle. At the same time,
the king had orders given for a speedy levy of six thousand Swiss, and
an army-corps was being formed on the frontiers of Champagne. The
queen-mother neglected no pains, no caresses, to hide from Conde the true
moving cause at the bottom of all these measures; and as "he was," says
the historian Davila, "by nature very ready to receive all sorts of
impressions," he easily suffered himself to be lulled to sleep. One day,
however, in June, 1567, he thought it about time to claim the fulfilment
of a promise that had been made him at the time of the peace of
Amboise of a post which would give him the rank and authority of
lieutenant-general of the kingdom, as his late brother, the King of
Navarre, had been; and he asked for the sword of constable which
Montmorency, in consequence of his great age, seemed disposed to resign
to the king. Catherine avoided giving any answer; but her favorite son,
Henry, Duke of Anjou, who was as yet only sixteen, repudiated this idea
with so much haughtiness that Conde felt called upon to ask some
explanations; there was no longer any question of war with Spain or of
an