The Reformation is considered by the Duke of Nevers, in a work printed in 1590, as it had been by Francis I., in his Apology in 1537, as a _coup-d'etat_ of Charles V. towards universal monarchy. The duke says, that the emperor silently permitted Luther to establish his principles in Germany, that they might split the confederacy of the elective princes, and by this division facilitate their more easy conquest, and play them off one against another, and by these means to secure the imperial crown hereditary in the house of Austria. Had Charles V. not been the mere creature of his politics, and had he felt any zeal for the Catholic cause, which he pretended to fight for, never would he have allowed the new doctrines to spread for more than twenty years without the least opposition. The famous League in France was raised for "religion and the relief of public grievances;" such was the pretext! After the princes and the people had alike become its victims, this "league" was discovered to have been formed by the pride and the ambition of the Guises, aided by the machinations of the Jesuits against the attempts of the Prince of Conde to dislodge them from their "seat of power." While the Huguenots pillaged, burnt, and massacred, declaring in their manifestoes that they were only fighting to _release the king_, whom they asserted was a prisoner of the Guises, the Catholics repaid them with the same persecution and the same manifestoes, declaring that they only wished _to liberate the Prince of Conde_, who was the prisoner of the Huguenots. The people were led on by the cry of "religion;" but this civil war was not in reality so much Catholic against Huguenot, as Guise against Conde. A parallel event occurred between our Charles I. and the Scotch Covenanters; and the king expressly declared, in "a large declaration, concerning the late tumults in Scotland," that "religion is only _pretended_, and used by them as a cloak to palliate their _intended rebellion_," which he demonstrated by the facts he alleged. There was a revolutionary party in France, which, taking the name of _Frondeurs_, shook that kingdom under the administration of Cardinal Mazarin, and held out for their pretext the public freedom. But that faction, composed of some of the discontented French princes and the mob, was entirely organized by Cardinal de Retz, who held them in hand, to check or to spur them as the occasion required, from a mere personal pique against Mazarin, who had not treated that vivacious genius with all the deference he exacted. This appears from his own Memoirs.