Four men, very unequal in influence as well as merit, Sully, Villeroi, Du Plessis-Mornay, and D’Aubigne, did Henry IV. effective service, by very different processes and in very different degrees, towards establishing and rendering successful this internal and external policy.  Three were Protestants; Villeroi alone was a Catholic.  Sully is beyond comparison with the other three.  He is the only one whom Henry IV. called my friend; the only one who had participated in all the life and all the government of Henry IV., his evil as well as his exalted fortunes, his most painful embarrassments at home as well as his greatest political acts; the only one whose name has remained inseparably connected with that of a master whom he served without servility as well as without any attempt to domineer.  There is no idea of entering here upon his personal history; we would only indicate his place in that of his king.  Maximilian de Bethune-Rosny, born in 1559, and six years younger than Henry of Navarre, was barely seventeen when in 1576 he attended Henry on his flight from the court of France to go and recover in Navarre his independence of position and character.  Rosny was content at first to serve him as a volunteer, “in order,” he said, “to learn the profession of arms from its first rudiments.”  He speedily did himself honor in several actions.  In 1580 the King of Navarre took him as chamberlain and counsellor.  On becoming King of France, Henry IV., in 1594, made him secretary of state; in 1596, put him on the council of finance; in 1597, appointed him grand surveyor of France, and, in 1599, superintendent-general of finance and master of the ordnance.  In 1602 he was made Marquis de Rosny and councillor of honor in the Parliament; then governor of the Bastille, superintendent of fortifications, and surveyor of Paris; in 1603, governor of Poitou.  Lastly, in 1606, his estate of Sully-sur-Loire was raised to a duchy-peerage, and he was living under this name, which has become his historical name, when, in 1610, the assassination of Henry IV. sent into retirement, for thirty-one years, the confidant of all his thoughts and the principal minister of a reign which, independently of the sums usefully expended for the service of the state and the advancement of public prosperity, had extinguished, according to the most trustworthy evidence, two hundred and thirty-five millions of debts, and which left in the coffers of the state, in ready money or in safe securities, forty-three million, one hundred and thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and ninety livres.

Nicholas de Neufville, Lord of Villeroi, who was born in 1543, and whose grandfather had been secretary of state under Francis I., was, whilst Henry III. was still reigning, member of a small secret council at which all questions relating to Protestants were treated of.  Though a strict Catholic, and convinced that the King of France ought to be openly in the ranks of the Catholics, and to govern with their support,