some very pressing letters.  The pope, in surprise, gave him a letter to read in the handwriting of King Louis XIII., saying that he did not at all wish the Bishop of Lucon to become cardinal, and begging that no notice might be taken of any recommendations which should be forwarded on the subject.  The ambassador, greatly surprised in his turn, ceased to insist.  It was evidently the doing of the Duke of Luynes, who, jealous of the Bishop of Lucon and dreading his influence, had demanded and obtained from the king this secret measure.  It was effectual; and, at the beginning of the year 1621, Richelieu had but a vague hope of the hat.  He had no idea, when he heard of this check, that at the end of a few months Luynes would undergo one graver still, would die almost instantaneously after having practised a policy analogous to that which Richelieu was himself projecting, and would leave the road open for him to obtain the cardinal’s hat, and once more enter into the councils of the king, who, however, said to the queen-mother, “I know him better than you, madame; he is a man of unbounded ambition.”

The two victories won in 1620 by the Duke of Luynes, one over the Protestants by the re-establishment in Warn of free worship for the Catholics, and the other over his secret rival Richelieu, by preventing him from becoming cardinal, had inspired him with great confidence in his good fortune.  He resolved to push it with more boldness than he had yet shown.  He purposed to subdue the Protestants as a political party whilst respecting their religious creed, and to reduce them to a condition of subjection in the state whilst leaving them free, as Christians, in the church.  A fundamentally contradictory problem; for the different liberties are closely connected, one with another, and have need to be security one for another; but, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, people were not so particular in point of consequence, and it was thought possible to give religious liberty its guarantees whilst refusing them to general political liberty.  That is what the Duke of Luynes attempted to do; to all the towns to which Henry IV. had bound himself by the edict of Nantes, he made a promise of preserving to them their religious liberties, and he called upon them at the same time to remain submissive and faithful subjects of the sovereign kingship.  La Rochelle, Montauban, Saumur, Sancerre, Charite-sur-Loire, and St. Jean d’Angely were in this category; and it was to Montauban, as one of the most important of those towns, that Louis XIII. first addressed his promise and his appeal, inconsistent one with the other.

Some years previously, in May, 1610, amidst the grief and anxiety awakened by the assassination of Henry IV. by Ravaillac, the population of Montauban had maintained and testified a pacific and moderate disposition.  The synod was in assembly when the news of the king’s death arrived there.  We read in the report of the town-council, under date of May 19, 1610,