Fiercer and more sanguinary was the persecution exercised upon the Huguenots, who were very numerous in France at this epoch. Henry IV., after his cowardly apostasy, in order to pacify and calm his Calvinist subjects, had, in 1598, by an edict dated from Nantes, the principal town of Brittany, insured to them the free exercise of their religion; leaving in their hands some strong places as a warranty. This edict had afterwards been disregarded by the French Government on many occasions, and Richelieu almost hazarded the throne in reducing Rochelle, the stronghold of the Calvinists; yet no sanguinary measures were resorted to, from purely religious motives, and the Huguenots lived, we may say, almost unmolested. But after 1660, numberless and incessant petty persecutions, or _tracasseries_, must have made those Protestants aware of their impending ruin. The Jesuit Lachaise was the principal instrument of all the cruelties exercised afterwards upon them. This Lachaise was a relation of the famous Father Cotton, and confessor to the king. He was the very personification of Jesuitism—handsome, polite, courteous, pleasing in his manners, it seemed as if his whole care were directed to captivate the love of all sorts of persons; he was never heard to utter a word of dissatisfaction against any one. S. Simon says of him, “Il était _fort Jesuite_—but polite, and without rage;” and Duclos affirms that “he knew how to irritate or calm the conscience of his penitents always with a view to his own interests;” and that, “though he had been a fierce persecutor of every party opposed to his own, he always spoke of them with great moderation.” He became the king’s confessor in 1675, and, by the most skilful and adroit flattery, acquired a great ascendancy over him. But do not imagine that he forgot his Jesuitical cunning. The profligacy and the continual state of adultery in which Louis lived was too great a scandal to be overlooked by such a pious man as Lachaise pretended to be. Sometimes he got angry with his royal penitent, and denied him absolution. “The solemnity of Easter” (the time in which the confession is obligatory), says S. Simon, “gave him the _political_ colic during the king’s passion for Madame de Montespan;” and Crétineau says that “he would not absolve the king, but sent him another Jesuit, who bravely absolved him.” Such was the man who undertook to extirpate the Huguenots.