have become what you now are by my means, dare to tell me that I come to sow discord among you? I shall take good care to keep you from doing what you have done heretofore." The council rose in anger, and passed into the adjoining apartment, where Catharine, who had not recovered from a temporary illness, strove to appease them as best she could. Charles ordered a new meeting, and, after hearing the deputies from Dijon, the king, conformably to the advice of the council, revoked the edict, and issued a prohibition of all exercise of the Protestant religion or instruction in its doctrines, save where it had been granted at Amboise. The chancellor was strictly enjoined to affix the seal of state to no papers relating to religious affairs without the consent of the royal council. [Sidenote: Protestantism on the northern frontier.] [Sidenote: Progress of the reformation at Cateau-Cambresis.] For several years the Protestants in the northern provinces of France had been busily communicating the religious views they had themselves embraced to their neighbors in Artois, Flanders, and Brabant. This intercourse became exceedingly close about the beginning of the year 1566; and its result was a renunciation of the papal church and its worship, which was participated in by such large numbers, and effected so instantaneously, that the friends and the foes of the new movement were almost equally surprised. The story of this sudden outburst of the reformatory spirit in Valenciennes, Tournay, and other places, accompanied--as are all movements that take a strong hold upon the popular feelings--with a certain amount of lawlessness, which expended itself, however, upon inanimate images and held sacred the lives and honor of men and women, has been well told in the histories of the country whose fortunes it chiefly affected.[407] I may be permitted, therefore, to pass over these indirect results of Huguenot influence, and glance at the fortunes of a border town within the present bounds of France, and closely connected with the history of France in the sixteenth century, of which little or no notice has been taken in this connection.[408] Cateau-Cambresis, famous for the treaty by which Henry the Second bartered away extensive conquests for a few paltry places that had fallen into the hands of the enemy, was, as its name--Chastel, Chateau or Cateau--imports, a castle and a borough that had grown up about it, both of them on lands belonging to the domain of Maximilian of Bergen, Archbishop and Duke of Cambray, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. It was smaller, but relatively far more important three hundred years ago than at the present day. For several years a few "good burgesses," with their families, had timidly studied the Holy Scriptures in secret, restrained from making an open profession of their faith by the terrible executions which they saw inflicted upon the Protestants in the Netherlands.