time an ardent patriot: he had at
heart the greatness of France as much as he had his personal creed; the
reverses of Francis I. and the preponderance of Spain in Europe oppressed
his spirit with a sense of national decadence, from which he wanted
France to lift herself up again. The moment appeared to him propitious;
let the king ally himself with Queen Elizabeth of England, the Prince of
Orange in the Low Countries, and the Protestant princes of Germany; here
was for France a certain guarantee of power in Europe, and at the same
time a natural opportunity for conquering Flanders, a possession so
necessary to her strength and her security. But high above this policy,
so thoroughly French, towered a question still more important than that
of even the security and the grandeur of France; that was the partition
of Europe between Catholicism and Protestantism; and it was in a country
Catholic in respect of the great majority, and governed by a kingship
with which Catholicism was hereditary, that, in order to put a stop to
civil war between French Catholics and Protestants, Coligny pressed the
king to put himself at the head of an essentially Protestant coalition,
and make it triumphant in Europe. This was, in the sixteenth century, a
policy wholly chimerical, however patriotic its intention may have been;
and the French Protestant hero who recommended it to Charles IX. did not
know that Protestantism was on the eve of the greatest disaster it would
have to endure in France.

A fact of a personal character tended to mislead Coligny. By his renown,
by the loftiness of his views, by the earnest gravity of his character
and his language he had produced a great effect upon Charles IX., a young
king of warm imagination and impressible and sympathetic temperament,
but, at the same time, of weak judgment. He readily gave way, in
Coligny's company, to outpourings which had all the appearance of perfect
and involuntary frankness. "Speaking one day to the admiral about the
course of conduct to be adopted as to the enterprise against Flanders,
and well knowing that the queen-mother lay under his suspicion, 'My dear
father,' said he, 'there is one thing herein of which we must take good
heed; and that is, that the queen, my mother, who likes to poke her nose
everywhere, as you know, learn nothing of this enterprise, at any rate as
regards the main spring of it, for she would spoil all for us.' 'As you
please, sir; but I take her