as no hope for France save in its
return to the bosom of the Church, he was yet too politic and too
farseeing to doubt that for him to oppress the Protestants would be not
only suicidal, but, what was worse in his eyes, ridiculous.

He knew, too, that with thirty or forty thousand fighting-men in the
field, with seven hundred and forty churches in the various provinces for
their places of worship, with all the best fortresses in France in their
possession, with leaders like Rohan, Lesdiguieres, Bouillon, and many
others, and with the most virtuous, self-denying, Christian government,
established and maintained by themselves, it would be madness for him and
his dynasty to deny the Protestants their political and religious
liberty, or to attempt a crusade against their brethren in the
Netherlands.

France was far more powerful than Spain, although the world had not yet
recognised the fact. Yet it would have been difficult for both united to
crush the new commonwealth, however paradoxical such a proposition seemed
to contemporaries.

Sully was conscientiously in favour of peace, and Sully was the one great
minister of France. Not a Lerma, certainly; for France was not Spain, nor
was Henry IV. a Philip III. The Huguenot duke was an inferior financier
to his Spanish contemporary, if it were the height of financial skill for
a minister to exhaust the resources of a great kingdom in order to fill
his own pocket. Sully certainly did not neglect his own interests, for he
had accumulated a fortune of at least seventy thousand dollars a year,
besides a cash capital estimated at a million and a half. But while
enriching himself, he had wonderfully improved the condition of the royal
treasury. He had reformed many abuses and opened many new sources of
income. He had, of course, not accomplished the whole Augean task of
purification. He was a vigorous Huguenot, but no Hercules, and demigods
might have shrunk appalled at the filthy mass of corruption which great
European kingdoms everywhere presented to the reformer's eye. Compared to
the Spanish Government, that of France might almost have been considered
virtuous, yet even there everything was venal.

To negotiate was to bribe right and left, and at every step. All the
ministers and great functionaries received presents, as a matter of
course, and it was necessary to pave the pathway even of their
ante-chambers with gold.

The king was fully aware of the practice, but winked at