More or less happily, the treaty of Cateau-Cambreis had regulated all those questions of external policy which were burdensome to France; she was once more at peace with her neighbors, and seemed to have nothing more to do than to gather in the fruits thereof. But she had in her own midst questions far more difficult of solution than those of her external policy, and these perils from within were threatening her more seriously than any from without. Since the death of Francis I., the religious ferment had pursued its course, becoming more general and more fierce; the creed of the Reformers had spread very much; their number had very much increased; permanent churches, professing and submitting to a fixed faith and discipline, had been founded; that of Paris was the first, in 1555; and the example had been followed at Orleans, at Chartres, at Lyons, at Toulouse, at Rochelle, in Normandy, in Touraine, in Guienne, in Poitou, in Dauphiny, in Provence, and in all the provinces, more or less. In 1561, it was calculated that there were twenty-one hundred and fifty reformed, or, as the expression then was, rectified (dressees), churches. “And this is no fanciful figure; it is the result of a census taken at the instigation of the deputies who represented the reformed churches at the conference of Poissy on the demand of Catherine de’ Medici, and in conformity with the advice of Admiral de Coligny.” [_La Reformation en France pendant sa premiere periode,_ by Henri Luttheroth, pp. 127-132.] It is clear that the movement of the Reformation in the sixteenth century was one of those spontaneous and powerful movements which have their source and derive their strength from the condition of men’s souls and of whole communities, and not merely from the personal ambitions and interests which soon come and mingle with them, whether it be to promote or to retard them. One thing has been already here stated and confirmed by facts; it was specially in France that the Reformation had this truly religious and sincere character; very far from supporting or tolerating it, the sovereign and public authorities opposed it from its very birth; under Francis I. it had met with no real defenders but its martyrs; and it was still the same under Henry II. During the reign of Francis I., within a space of twenty-three years, there had been eighty-one capital executions for heresy; during that of Henry II., twelve years, there were ninety-seven for the same cause, and at one of these executions Henry II. was present in person, on the space in front of Notre-Dame: a spectacle which Francis I. had always refused to see. In 1551, 1557, and 1559, Henry II., by three royal edicts, kept up and added to all the prohibitions and penalties in force against the Reformers. In 1550, the massacre of the Vaudians was still in such lively and odious remembrance that a noble lady of Provence, Madame de Cental, did not hesitate to