sufficiently important to have been kept in remembrance by history; and during that space of time formal civil war, religious and partisan, broke out, stopped and recommenced in four campaigns, signalized, each of them, by great battles, and four times terminated by impotent or deceptive treaties of peace which, on the 24th of August, 1572, ended, for their sole result, in the greatest massacre of French history, the St. Bartholomew.

The first religious war, under Charles IX., appeared on the point of breaking out in April, 1561, some days after that the Duke of Guise, returning from the massacre of Vassy, had entered Paris, on the 16th of March, in triumph.  The queen-mother, in dismay, carried off the king to Melun at first, and then to Fontainebleau, whilst the Prince of Conde, having retired to Meaux, summoned to his side his relatives, his friends, and all the leaders of the Reformers, and wrote to Coligny, “that Caesar had not only crossed the Rubicon, but was already at Rome, and that his banners were beginning to wave all over the neighboring country.”  For some days Catherine and L’Hospital tried to remain out of Paris with the young king, whom Guise, the Constable de Montmorency, and the King of Navarre, the former being members and the latter an ally of the triumvirate, went to demand back from them.  They were obliged to submit to the pressure brought to bear upon them.  The constable was the first to enter Paris, and went, on the 2d of April, and burned down the two places of worship which, by virtue of the decree of January 17, 1561, had been granted to the Protestants.  Next day the King of Navarre and the Duke of Guise, in their turn, entered the city in company with Charles IX. and Catherine.  A council was assembled at the Louvre to deliberate as to the declaration of war, which was deferred.  Whilst the king was on his way back to Paris, Conde hurried off to take up his quarters at Orleans, whither Coligny went promptly to join him.  They signed, with the gentlemen who came to them from all parts, a compact of association “for the honor of God, for the liberty of the king, his brothers and the queen-mother, and for the maintenance of decrees;” and Conde, in writing to the Protestant princes of Germany to explain to them his conduct, took the title of protector of the house and crown of France.  Negotiations still went on for nearly three months.  The chiefs of the two parties attempted to offer one another generous and pacific solutions; they even had two interviews; but Catherine was induced by the Catholic triumvirate to expressly declare that she could not allow in France more than one single form of worship.  Conde and his friends said that they could not lay down their arms until the triumvirate was overthrown, and the execution of decrees granting them liberty of worship, in certain places and to a certain extent, had been secured to them.  Neither party liked to acknowledge itself beaten in this way without having struck a blow.  And in the early part of July, 1562, the first religious war began.