(2.) Instances of foreign intervention in the _internal_ affairs of a nation are more pertinent. They are numerous, and not always harmonious, especially if we compare the new with the old. In the earlier times such intervention was regarded with repugnance. But the principle then declared has been sapped on the one side by the conspiracies of tyranny seeking the suppression of liberal institutions, and on the other by a generous sympathy breaking forth from time to time in their support. According to old precedents, most of which are found in the gossipping book of Wicquefort,[54] whence they have been copied by Mr. Wildman, in his “Institutes of International Law,”[55] even _foreign intercession_ was prohibited. Not even in the name of charity could one ruler speak to another on the domestic affairs of his government. Peter, King of Aragon, was astonished at a proposed embassy from Alphonso, King of Castile, entreating mercy for rebels. Charles the Ninth of France, a detestable monarch, in reply to ambassadors of the Protestant princes of Germany, pleading for his Protestant subjects, insolently declared that he required no tutors to teach him how to rule. And yet this same sovereign did not hesitate to ask the Duke of Savoy to receive certain subjects “into his benign favor, and to restore and reëstablish them in their confiscated estates.”[56] In this appeal there was a double inconsistency; for it was not only interference in the affairs of another prince, but it was in behalf of Protestants, only a few months before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Henry the Third, successor of Charles, and another detestable monarch, in reply to the Protestant ambassadors, announced that he was a sovereign prince, and ordered them to leave his dominions. Louis the Thirteenth was of milder nature, and yet, when the English ambassador, the Earl of Carlisle, presumed to speak in favor of the Huguenots, he intimated that no interference between the King of France and his subjects could be approved. The Cardinal Richelieu, who governed France so long, learning that an attempt was made to procure the intercession of the Pope, stopped it by a message to his Holiness, that the King would be displeased by any such interference. The Pope himself, on another recorded occasion, admitted that it would be a pernicious precedent for a subject to negotiate terms of accommodation through a foreign prince. On still another occasion, when the King of France, forgetting his own rule, interposed in behalf of the Barberini family, Innocent the Tenth declared, that, having no desire to interfere in the affairs of France, he trusted his Majesty would not interfere in his. Queen Christina of Sweden, merely hinting a disposition to proffer good offices for the settlement of the unhappy divisions in France, was told by the Queen Regent that she need give herself no trouble about them, and one of her own ministers at Stockholm declared that the overture was properly rejected.