He saw that the highest good of the kingdom required not that he should impose upon it either form of belief or worship, but give equal opportunity and privilege to both.

To the consternation of the Huguenots, he announced himself ready to listen to the arguments in favor of the religion of Rome; and it took just five hours of deliberation to convince him of its truth.  He declared himself ready to abjure his old faith.  Bitter reproaches on the one side and rejoicings on the other greeted this decision.  It was not heroic.  But many even among the Protestants acknowledged it to be an act of supreme political wisdom.

Peace was restored, and the Edict of Nantes, which quickly followed, proved to his old friends, the Huguenots, that they were not forgotten.  The Protestants, with disabilities removed, shared equal privileges with the Catholics throughout the kingdom, and the first victory for religious liberty was splendidly won.

An era of unexampled prosperity dawned.  Never had the kingdom been so wisely and beneficently governed.  Sincerity, simplicity, and sympathy had taken the place of dissimulation, craft, and cruelty.  Uplifting agencies were everywhere at work, reaching even to the peasantry, that forgotten element in the nation.

The formal abjuration of the Protestant faith was made by the King in the Church of St. Denis in 1593.  This church also witnessed the marriage of Henry with Marie de’ Medici, after his release from her debased relative, Margaret of Valois, daughter of Catharine de’ Medici.  Henry IV., great although he was, was not above the ordinary weaknesses of humanity, and, captivated by the beauty of Marie, was a willing party to the Italian marriage which was urged upon him, which marriage was the one mistake of a great reign.

It was not to be expected that any minister would rise to the full stature of Henry IV. at this time.  But in the Duke of Sully he had a wise and efficient instrument for his plan, which was out of the chaos left by the devastation of thirty years of religious wars, to evolve peace and prosperity; and to create economic conditions upon a foundation insuring growth and permanence.

The royal authority, impaired by the successors of Francis, must first be restored.  And to that end all political elements, including the States General, must be held firmly down; and that body, representing the Tiers Etat, was never summoned after France was well in hand by the king who was par excellence the friend of the people!

It is the Edict of Nantes which stands preeminent among the events of this reign, and which is Henry’s monument in the annals of France.  His foreign policy was controlled by a desire to check the preponderance of the Hapsburgs; that being, in fact, the dominant sentiment in Europe at that time.  But a remarkable proof of the breadth of his treatment of this subject is the plan he formulated of a European tribunal composed of the five great powers, which should insist upon the maintenance of a balance of power—­a phrase common enough now, but heard then for the first time; and which had for its immediate purpose the separating of the crown of Spain and the empire, by forbidding their being held by members of the same family, and of course designed as a check upon the Hapsburgs.