of a general permission granted them by Henry, and met, not in synod, but in general assembly, at the town of Sainte Foy, in the month of June, 1594.  Thereupon they divided all France into nine great provinces or circles, composed each of several governments or provinces of the realm.  Each circle had a separate council, composed of from five to seven members, and commissioned to fix and apportion the separate imposts, to keep up a standing army, to collect the supplies necessary for the maintenance and defence of the party.  The Calvinistic republic had its general assemblies, composed of nine deputies or representatives from each of the nine circles.  These assemblies were invested with authority to order, on the general account, all that the juncture required, that is to say, with a legislative power distinct from that of the crown and nation. . . .  If the king ceased to pay the sums necessary to keep up the garrisons in the towns left to the Reformers, the governors were to seize the talliages in the hands of the king’s receivers, and apply the money to the payment of the garrisons.  And in case the central power should attempt to repress these violent procedures, or to substitute as commandant in those places a Catholic for a Protestant, all the Calvinists of the locality and the neighboring districts were to unite and rise in order to give the assistance of the strong hand to the Protestant governors so attacked.  Independently of the ordinary imposts, a special impost was laid on the Calvinists, and gave their leaders the disposal of a yearly sum of one hundred and twenty thousand livres (four hundred and forty thousand francs of the present day).  The Calvinistic party had thus a territorial area, an administration, finances, a legislative power and an executive power independent of those of the countr;y; or, in other words, the means of taking resolutions contrary to those of the mass of the nation, and of upholding them by revolt.  All they wanted was a Huguenot stadtholder to oppose to the King of France, and they were looking out for one.”

Henry IV. did not delude himself as to the tendency of such organization amongst those of his late party.  “He rebuffed very sternly (and wisely),” says L’Estoile, “those who spoke to him of it.  ’As for a protector,’ he told them, ’he would have them to understand that there was no other protector in France but himself for one side or the other; the first man who should be so daring as to assume the title would do so at the risk of his life; he might be quite certain of that.’” Had Henry IV. been permitted to read the secrets of a not so very distant future, he might have told the Huguenots of his day that the time was not so far off when their pretension to political organization and to the formation of a state within the state, would compromise their religious liberty and furnish the absolute government of Louis XIV. with excuses for abolishing the protective edict which Henry IV.’s sympathy was on the point of granting them, and which, so far as its purely religious provisions went, was duly respected by the sagacity of Cardinal Richelieu.