It was and had been really civil war in France.  In the Netherlands it had become essentially a struggle for independence against a foreign monarch; although the germ out of which both conflicts had grown to their enormous proportions was an effort of the multitude to check the growth of papacy.  In France, accordingly, civil war, attended by that gaunt sisterhood, murder, pestilence, and famine, had swept from the soil almost everything that makes life valuable.  It had not brought in its train that extraordinary material prosperity and intellectual development at which men wondered in the Netherlands, and to which allusion has just been made.  But a fortunate conjunction of circumstances had now placed Henry of Navarre in a position of vantage.  He represented the principle of nationality, of French unity.  It was impossible to deny that he was in the regular line of succession, now that luckless Henry of Valois slept with his fathers, and the principle of nationality might perhaps prove as vital a force as attachment to the Roman Church.  Moreover, the adroit and unscrupulous Bearnese knew well how to shift the mantle of religion from one shoulder to the other, to serve his purposes or the humours of those whom he addressed.

“The King of Spain would exclude me from the kingdom and heritage of my father because of my religion,” he said to the Duke of Saxony; “but in that religion I am determined to persist so long as I shall live.”  The hand was the hand of Henry, but it was the voice of Duplessis Mornay.

“Were there thirty crowns to win,” said he, at about the same time to the States of France, “I would not change my religion on compulsion, the dagger at my throat.  Instruct me, instruct me, I am not obstinate.”  There spoke the wily freethinker, determined not to be juggled out of what he considered his property by fanatics or priests of either church.  Had Henry been a real devotee, the fate of Christendom might have been different.  The world has long known how much misery it is in the power of crowned bigots to inflict.

On the other hand, the Holy League, the sacred Confederacy, was catholic or nothing.  Already it was more papist than the pope, and loudly denounced Sixtus V. as a Huguenot because he was thought to entertain a weak admiration both for Henry the heretic and for the Jezebel of England.

But the holy confederacy was bent on destroying the national government of France, and dismembering the national domain.  To do this the pretext of trampling out heresy and indefinitely extending the power of Rome, was most influential with the multitude, and entitled the leaders to enjoy immense power for the time being, while maturing their schemes for acquiring permanent possession of large fragments of the national territory.  Mayenne, Nemours, Aumale, Mercoeur longed to convert temporary governments into independent principalities.  The Duke of Lorraine looked with longing eyes on Verdun, Sedan, and, the other fair cities within the territories contiguous—­to his own domains.  The reckless house of Savoy; with whom freebooting and landrobbery seemed geographical, and hereditary necessities, was busy on the southern borders, while it seemed easy enough for Philip, ii., in right of his daughter, to secure at least the duchy of Brittany before entering on the sovereignty of the whole kingdom.