and of mutual toleration; all excellent reasons, but with merits consisting in their practical soundness, not in their logical connection with the superior principle to which the sixteenth century had not yet attained.  It was all very well for Henry IV. to maintain the cause and to have the support of the great majority in France; but outside of this majority he was incessantly encountering and incessantly having to put down or to humor two parties, or rather factions, full of discontent and as irreconcilable with him as among themselves, for it was not peace and tolerance that they demanded of him, but victory and supremacy in the name of absolute right.

This, then, was the scene; on one side a great majority of Catholics and Protestants favorable for different practical reasons to Henry IV. turned Catholic king; on the other, two minorities, one of stubborn Catholics of the League, the other of Protestants anxious for their creed and their liberty; both discontented and distrustful.  Such, after Henry IV.’s abjuration, was the striking feature in the condition of France and in the situation of her king.  This triple fact was constantly present to the mind of Henry IV., and ruled his conduct during all his reign; all the acts of his government are proof of that.

His first embarrassments arose from the faction of Catholics to the backbone.  After his abjuration just as much as at his accession, the League continued to exist and to act against him.  The legate, Gaetani, maintained that the bishops of France had no right, without the pope’s approval, to give an excommunicated prince absolution; he opposed the three months’ truce concluded by Mayenne, and threatened to take his departure for Rome.  Mayenne, to appease him and detain him, renewed the alliance between the League and Spain, prevailed upon the princes and marshals to renew also the oath of union, caused the states-general of the League to vote the adoption of the Council of Trent, and, on proroguing them, August 8, 1593, received from them a promise to return at the expiration of the truce.  For the members of that assembly it was not a burdensome engagement; independently of the compensation they had from their provinces, which was ten livres (thirty-six francs, sixty centimes) a day during each session, they received from the King of Spain a regular retainer, which raised it, for the five months from June to October, to seventy-two thousand one hundred and forty-four francs, which they divided between themselves.  “It was presumed,” said Jehan l’Huillier, provost of tradesmen, to one of his colleagues who was pressing him to claim this payment from the ambassador of Spain, “that the money came from M. de Mayenne, not from foreigners; “but honest people, such as Du Vair and Thielement, did not content themselves with this presumption, and sent to the Hotel-Dieu, for maintenance of the poor, the share which was remitted to them. [Poirson, Histoire du Regne de Henry IV., t. i. p. 463.  Picot, Histoire des Etats generaux, t. iii. p. 249.]