In 1559 Francis II., son of Francis I., succeeded to the crown of France. Amid the flattering successes of the papal intrigues, the rapid progress of Protestantism in Europe, and the fearless boldness of its advocates, occasioned great uneasiness to the Holy See. Scorning the mild but able services of reason and conciliation, it counselled the most sanguinary measures. The records of the times are consequently filled with accounts of disorders, assassinations, massacres, and the most deplorable conflicts. The French nation was divided into two great factions; the one in favor of Catholicism, the other in favor of Protestantism. By means of the papal machinery of bishops, abbots, priests, monks and spies, the Catholics were made to believe that the religious disorders which had convulsed the empire were but a prelude to an intended extermination of all Romanists. To narrow-minded bigots, who absurdly believed that their church afforded the only possible method of escaping the pangs of purgatory, and of obtaining eternal happiness, all the zeal which their hopes and fears of eternity could inspire was awakened in the defence of their religion. While the Protestants who, on the other hand, believed that Catholicism was idolatry, subversive of Christianity, demoralizing in its tendency, and destructive of the rights of conscience, reason and religious liberty, became equally heated in the defence of their faith. Both factions had been educated in intolerent principles; in the belief that error of opinion was perilous to the soul; that it rendered a person a proper object of aversion and denunciation; and, that a difference of opinion was a sufficient justification of hatred and persecution. Both factions being educated in the principles of bigotry and intolerance, nursed amid convulsions and barbarity, embittered against each other by mutual provocations and injury, were incapable of pacification by just and reasonable concession. The Catholics, having the power, were enabled to inflict on the Protestants the deeper injuries; and, to the credit of the Protestants it will ever be remembered, that they sought not to exterminate their foes, but to obtain equal rights with them.