andi_, paid by
students to the professors: the Jesuits taught gratuitously, and the high
reputation of the celebrated Maldonado enraged the doctors beyond measure.
The parliaments and the doctors were the chief fomenters of the league; and
they were seconded by all the religious orders, the Jesuits excepted. The
parliament, headed by Harlay, made flaming harangues and arrets: the
doctors of the university and friars exhibited fanatical processions and
sermons; they pronounced Henry III and Henry IV excommunicated tyrants;
they canonized Jacques Clement; they rewarded his mother and family; they
openly preached regicide. Their rage equalled that of the modern jacobins.
They all, of course, detested the Jesuits, who, we may believe, were also
obnoxious to the Hugonot party. When the league was expiring, by the
conversion of Henry IV, the parliaments and university, constrained to
abjure it, were nevertheless determined upon effecting the banishment of
the Jesuits before {27} the king could enter on his government. The doctors
renewed their suits, and employed as advocates Arnaud, Pasquier, and Dolle,
who went into the courts with certainty of success. Completely successful
they would have been, but for the wisdom of the minister, the duke de
Sully, who, though a leader of the Hugonots, and consequently not biassed
in favour of the Jesuits, indeed evidently their enemy, was too nobly
minded to give an advantage to their assailants, which his master would not
have done. He stopped the proceedings, by interposing the authority of the
absent king, "which," said he, "is not to be compromised _pour une pique de
pretres et de theologiens_[10]." The prosecutors and the judges,
disconcerted for the time, resolved to lose no opportunity to effect their
object, and they soon found one in the crime of Chatel, in which they
triumphed without a shadow of proof. Not a Jesuit was ever proved to have
entered into the league: no writer accuses them of it, the advocates {28}
just mentioned excepted; and their invectives, amassed in _Les Extraits des
Assertions_, are the sole foundation of all that is said by Monclar,
Chalotais, and the other authors of the _Comptes Rendus_.

It was necessary to enter into this detail to enable the reader to trace
the foul sources of the chief authorities on which Robertson relied: but
what shall we think of them, in spite of that historian's compliment to the
elegance of their pens, when we hear, that these _