It was a great deal, towards securing the supremacy of a great family and its leading members, to thus possess the favor of the court and the functions of government; but the power of the Guises had a still higher origin and a still deeper foundation.  “It was then,” said Michael de Castelnau, one of the most intelligent and most impartial amongst the chroniclers of the sixteenth century, “that schism and divisions in religious matters began to be mixed up with affairs of state.  Well, all the clergy of France, and nearly all the noblesse and the people who belonged to the Roman religion, considered that the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise were, as it were, called of God to preserve the Catholic religion established in France for the last twelve hundred years.  And it seemed to them not only an act of impiety to change or alter it in any way whatever, but also an impossibility to do so without ruin to the state.  The late king, Henry, had made a decree in the month of June, 1559, being then at Ecouen, by which the judges were bound to sentence all Lutherans to death, and which was published and confirmed by all the Parliaments, without any limitation or modification whatever, and with a warning to the judges not to mitigate the penalty, as they had done for some years previously.  Different judgments were pronounced upon the decree:  those who took the most political and most zealous view of religion considered that it was necessary, as well to preserve and maintain the Catholic religion as to keep down the seditious, who, under the cloak of religion, were doing all they could to upset the political condition of the kingdom.  Others, who cared nothing for religion, or for the state, or for order in the body politic, also thought the decree necessary, not at all for the purpose of exterminating the Protestants, —­for they held that it would tend to multiply them,—­but because it would offer a means of enriching themselves by the confiscations ensuing upon condemnation, and because the king would thus be able to pay off forty-two millions of livres which he owed, and have money in hand, and, besides that, satisfy those who were demanding recompense for the services they had rendered the crown, wherein many placed their hopes.” [Memoires de Michael de Castelnau, in the Petitot collection, Series I., t. xxxiii. pp. 24-27.]

The Guises were, in the sixteenth century, the representatives and the champions of these different cliques and interests, religious or political, sincere in their belief or shameless in their avidity, and all united under the flag of the Catholic church.  And so, when they came into power, “there was nothing,” says a Protestant chronicler, “but fear and trembling at their name.”  Their acts of government soon confirmed the fears as well as the hopes they had inspired.  During the last six months of 1559 the edict issued by Henry II. from Ecouen was not only strictly enforced, but aggravated by