of the rivalry between the houses of Guise and Chatillon, and because they of Guise had been threatened by the admiral’s friends, who suspected them of being at the bottom of the hurt inflicted upon him.”  He, the same day, addressed to the governors of the provinces a letter in which he invested the disturbance with the same character, and gave the same explanation of it.  The Guises complained violently at being thus disavowed by the king, who had the face to throw upon them alone the odium of the massacre which he had ordered.  Next day, August 25, the king wrote to all his agents, at home and abroad, another letter, affirming that “what had happened at Paris had been done solely to prevent the execution of an accursed conspiracy which the admiral and his allies had concocted against him, his mother, and his brothers;” and, on the 26th of August, he went with his two brothers to hold in state a bed of justice, and make to the Parliament the same declaration against Coligny and his party.  “He could not,” he said, “have parried so fearful a blow but by another very violent one; and he wished all the world to know that what had happened at Paris had been done not only with his consent, but by his express command.”  Whereupon it was enjoined upon the court, says De Thou, “to cause investigations to be made as to the conspiracy of Coligny, and to decree what it should consider proper, conformably with the laws and with justice.”  The next day but one, August 28, appeared a royal manifesto running, “The king willeth and intendeth that all noblemen and others whosoever of the religion styled Reformed be empowered to live and abide in all security and liberty, with their wives, children, and families, in their houses, as they have heretofore done and were empowered to do by benefit of the edicts of pacification.  And nevertheless, for to obviate the troubles, scandals, suspicion, and distrust, which might arise by reason of the services and assemblies that might take place both in the houses of the said noblemen and elsewhere, as is permitted by the aforesaid edicts of pacification, his Majesty doth lay very express inhibitions and prohibitions upon all the said noblemen and others of the said religion against holding assemblies, on any account whatsoever, until that, by the said lord the king, after having provided for the tranquillity of his kingdom, it be otherwise ordained.  And that, on pain of confiscation of body and goods in case of disobedience.”

These tardy and lying accusations officially brought against Coligny and his friends; these promises of liberty and security for the Protestants, renewed in the terms of the edicts of pacification, and, in point of fact, annulled at the very moment at which they were being renewed; the massacre continuing here and there in France, at one time with the secret connivance and at another notwithstanding the publicly-given word of the king and the queen-mother; all this policy, at one and the same time violent and timorous, incoherent