ious and political parties,
the Catholic and the Protestant, were formed and at grips; the house of
Lorraine at the head of the Catholics, and the house of Bourbon, Conde,
and Coligny at the head of the Protestants, with royalty trying feebly
and vainly to maintain between them a hollow peace. To this stormy
and precarious, but organized and clearly defined condition, the
St. Bartholomew had caused anarchy to succeed. Protestantism,
vanquished but not destroyed, broke up into provincial and municipal
associations without recognized and dominant heads, without discipline
or combination in respect of either their present management or their
ultimate end. Catholicism, though victorious, likewise underwent a
break-up; men of mark, towns and provinces, would not accept the
St. Bartholomew and its consequences; a new party, the party of the
policists, sprang up, opposed to the principle and abjuring the practice
of persecution, having no mind to follow either the Catholics in their
outrages or royalty in its tergiversations, and striving to maintain in
the provinces and the towns, where it had the upper hand, enough of order
and of justice to at least keep at a distance the civil war which was
elsewhere raging. Languedoc owed to Marshal de Damville, second son of
the Constable Anne de Montmorency, this comparatively bearable position.
But the degree of security and of local peace which it offered the people
was so imperfect, so uncertain, that the break-up of the country and of
the state went still farther. In a part of Languedoc, in the Vivarais,
the inhabitants, in order to put their habitations and their property in
safety, resolved to make a league amongst themselves, without consulting
any authority, not even Marshal de Damville, the peace-seeking governor
of their province. Their treaty of alliance ran, that arms should be
laid down throughout the whole of the Vivarais; that none, foreigner or
native, should be liable to trouble for the past; that tillers of the
soil and traders should suffer no detriment in person or property; that
all hostilities should cease in the towns and all forays in the country;
that there should everywhere be entire freedom for commerce; that cattle
which had been lifted should be immediately restored gratis; that
concerted action should be taken to get rid of the garrisons out of the
country and to raze the fortresses, according as the public weal might
require; and finally that whosoeve