The royal army presented itself before the little town of Privas, in the month of May, 1629. The inhabitants, seized with terror, amounting to a panic, fled to the fields; and the garrison, which retired to the fort, were soon forced to capitulate. At the moment of the troops entering, the explosion of a powder-magazine caused the suspicion of an ambush. The eight hundred Huguenot soldiers forming the garrison were murdered, fifty burghers hanged, the others sent to the galleys, the town sacked and burnt, and the property of the inhabitants confiscated to the crown. The missionaries, who followed in the rear of the army to convert the heretics, ascribed this catastrophe to the _anger of God_. The merciless butchery at Privas spread consternation and dismay. The king marched upon Cevennes without meeting with any resistance; and the Duke de Rohan, seeing that the affairs of his party were desperate, sued for peace, in concert with the general assembly transferred to Anduze. Richelieu imposed as the first condition, that all the fortifications of the Huguenot towns should be razed to the ground. Anduze, and the province of Cevennes, submitted after some difficulty; and the king, being then at Nismes, published the _Edict of Grace_, in the month of July, 1629. The name alone of this edict marked a new order of things. It was no longer a pacification—it was a _grace_, a grace granted by the good-will of the sovereign to his vanquished subjects. The preamble spoke of nothing but their _rebellion_, and of the goodness of the king: “to which we are the more easily disposed,” Louis XIII. was made to say, “because we have been desirous, by a rare instance of clemency, after so many relapses, the more advantageously to win the hearts of our subjects, spare the effusion of blood, the devastation of the province, and all the disorders and calamities of war; and we are moved to this solely by compassion for their misery and love for their well-being.” The Reformers were reinstated in the possession of their places of worship, their cemeteries, and the exercise of their religion in the places they had before used, pending their return to the bosom of the (Roman) Catholic church, “in which,” adds Louis XIII., “for more than eleven hundred successive years, the kings, our predecessors, have lived without interruption or change; there being no possible way of so well testifying to the affection we bear them, than by desiring to find them in the same road of salvation that we keep and follow ourselves.” There was a threat expressed in this hope, and the priests did not fail to avail themselves of it at the opportune time. There was also, as we shall see, a pretence of the Cardinal de Richelieu, who, aspiring to every kind of glory, flattered himself that he would be able to unite the two religions.