For ten years Europe was at peace, but it was a peace which was in reality little more than a breathing space, devoted by both parties to preparations for the next round in the struggle. While William was plotting and scheming for his father-in-law’s crown, Louis was strengthening his frontier by diplomacy as well as by arms. Both realised that the duel was still undecided, both hesitated to be the first to loose again the dogs of war. Meanwhile other difficulties of a serious nature came up for settlement in France herself. The Church of France had always maintained a much greater independence of the authority of the Pope than had been the case in Spain or in Italy or in Germany since the Reformation. The long continued presence of Mohammedanism in Spain, and the pressure of heresy in Germany, had naturally tended to augment the personal authority of the Pope over those countries. In France the tendency had been the other way. National spirit and national pride called out by the liberation of the country from the English yoke, and employed in the task of conquest in Italy, emphasised national rights and distinctions. As in England the feeling of the people was strongly anti-papal, and it was the Crown not the Church which found it to its interest to make surrender to the claims of the Roman Curia, in order to gain a useful ally in its struggle with the nobles. [Sidenote: =The independence of the Gallican Church.=] As however the royal power in France gradually made itself supreme over all departments of the national life, the kings began in their turn to take up the cudgels against the Pope in a quarrel, which could not fail in the end to minister to their own greatness. Francis I. was within an ace of declaring France independent of the Holy See, the Valois kings refused for many years to take any part whatever in the council of Trent, and when the cardinal of Lorraine did appear with the French bishops, it was rather to present an ultimatum than to take part in a discussion. The doctrinal decisions of the council were never formally accepted by France at all. Heresy, in the form of Huguenotism, was suppressed in France much more by the Crown than by the efforts of the Pope, and the Jesuits were only admitted into France under strict limitations. Richelieu and Mazarin, though cardinals of the Roman Church, did not hesitate to pursue a policy in strong opposition to the wishes of the Pope, and Louis XIV. himself had not scrupled in the earlier years of his reign to put a public indignity upon the Pontiff. The very orthodoxy of the kings themselves and of their government made them the more jealous of all exercise of authority in their dominions by another sovereign, even though he was the Pope. [Sidenote: =Claim of the regale over the whole of France.=]