“I have so deeply offended my father by maintaining a Lutheran preacher in my service, that I am apprehensive of being expelled as a fugitive, and hope to find an asylum in your court.”

The Catholics of course looked with apprehension to the accession of Maximilian to the throne, while the Protestants anticipated the event with great hope.  There were, however, many considerations of vast moment influencing Maximilian not to separate himself, in form, from the Catholic church.  Philip, his cousin, King of Spain, was childless, and should he die without issue, Ferdinand would inherit that magnificent throne, which he could not hope to ascend, as an avowed Protestant, without a long and bloody war.  It had been the most earnest dying injunction of his father that he should not abjure the Catholic faith.  His wife was a very zealous Catholic, as was also each one of his brothers.  There were very many who remained in the Catholic church whose sympathies were with the reformers—­who hoped to promote reformation in the Church without leaving it.  Influenced by such considerations, Maximilian made a public confession of the Catholic faith, received his father’s confessor, and maintained, in his court, the usages of the papal church.  He was, however, the kind friend of the Protestants, ever seeking to shield them from persecution, claiming for them a liberal toleration, and seeking, in all ways, to promote fraternal religious feeling throughout his domains.

The prudence of Maximilian wonderfully allayed the bitterness of religious strife in Germany, while other portions of Europe were desolated with the fiercest warfare between the Catholics and Protestants.  In France, in particular, the conflict raged with merciless fury.  It was on August 24th, 1572, but a few years after Maximilian ascended the throne, when the Catholics of France perpetrated the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, perhaps the most atrocious crime recorded in history.  The Catholics and Protestants in France were nearly equally divided in numbers, wealth and rank.  The papal party, finding it impossible to crush their foes by force of arms, resolved to exterminate them by a simultaneous massacre.  They feigned toleration and reconciliation.  The court of Paris invited all the leading Protestants of the kingdom to the metropolis to celebrate the nuptials of Henry, the young King of Navarre, with Margaret, sister of Charles IX., the reigning monarch.  Secret orders were dispatched all over the kingdom, for the conspirators, secretly armed, at a given signal, by midnight, to rise upon the Protestants, men, women and children, and utterly exterminate them.  “Let not one remain alive,” said the King of France, “to tell the story.”