The cruel persecutions of the Huguenots must also be set down against the king, although in this, surely, we should make much allowance because of the feeling of the age in such matters—a feeling not by any means the same as in our day. Louis, like many others before and since, endeavored to atone for the excesses and frailties of his private life by his public zeal for orthodoxy, fancying that the slaughter of heretics would offset his adulteries. His crowning crime was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. By this arbitrary act of unprovoked despotism he annulled forever all the highly prized privileges granted to the Huguenots, after their large sufferings and heroic efforts in self-defense, by Henry IV and Louis XIII. He absolutely prohibited the exercise of their religion throughout the kingdom, with the sole exception of Alsace; ordered their temples to be leveled with the ground, and their ministers to quit France within fifteen days; forbade the people to follow their pastors into exile under pain of confiscation and condemnation to the galleys; and required their children to be baptized henceforth by the Catholic priests and educated as members of the Established Church. Before this, in the earlier years of the reign, stringent measures had been set in operation for the conversion of the Protestants and the establishment of uniformity of faith and Church government throughout the kingdom. Louis was intolerant of dissent, partly from political motives. He could not brook that any of his subjects should exercise so much independence and freedom of thought as was involved in worshiping God or thinking about Him after a different pattern from the one set by himself. They ought all to take their opinions from the throne, he held, in religious as well as in secular matters, and because they did not they were extremely objectionable and dangerous. As early as 1656 a disposition was shown to interpret the Edict of Nantes—given by Henry IV, April 15, 1598—in a narrow partisan fashion, to the disadvantage of the Protestants. Numbers of the Reformed places of worship were shut up on frivolous pretenses. The worshipers were excluded from all public functions, from the liberal professions, from the universities, from engaging in various branches of commerce and industry. They were forbidden to intermarry with Catholics, and their children were encouraged to forsake the faith of their parents by being declared capable of choosing for themselves at the age of seven years. Every sort of pressure was applied. A Bureau of Conversions was established under the direction of the Minister Pelissier, who disbursed the funds intrusted to him at the rate of six livres for every abjuration of the Reformed religion. Milder measures not proving sufficiently efficacious and speedy, more severe and savage means were employed. Dragoons were sent into the disturbed districts and quartered on the inhabitants; they were permitted, and even encouraged, to abandon