England, under Mary, whom Philip had married in 1554, naturally would give Holland no help. She had, besides, her own religious troubles, for Mary, {58} under her husband's direction, was doing all that she dared to bring England back under the authority of Rome. No tribunal with the name of Inquisition or of Holy Office was established, but the persecution of Protestants, with torture and burning, went forward almost as briskly as if there had been. A small force came to Holland's help from Germany, at one moment of the long struggle, but little could be expected from that country, in which the states were divided in their sympathies between Rome and the Reformation. The attitude of France was uncertain and varied. Her natural action would have been to oppose Spain, as in the days of Francis and Charles, but she was a Roman Catholic country. She was distracted, too, by her own troubles with her own Protestants, called Huguenots. The form of Protestantism which had made its way in France was somewhat different from that taught by Luther. It inclined to the doctrines taught by Calvin. But Calvin was a reformer as earnest and even more bitter than Luther himself in opposition to Rome. It was what has been called, after him, the Calvinistic form of Protestantism which prevailed in the Netherlands also, and, with some modification, in England and Scotland. The details of the difference we need not consider. The main feature which they had in common and which so affected this Greatest Story was their resistance to Rome. [Sidenote: The Huguenots] The origin of that name Huguenot, by which the Protestants in France were known, is doubtful, nor does it greatly matter. Beginning in the reign of Francis, the reformed party in France grew stronger during the reign of several succeeding kings. There were two great families in France at this time, the Bourbons and the Guises. The former became leaders of the Protestants and the latter of the Catholics. Civil war broke out in 1562. Elizabeth of England {59} sent troops to help the Huguenots, but the fortune of the war went against them. A Catholic League was formed for their extermination. A general massacre of Huguenots on St. Bartholomew's Day, in 1572, has made that day lamentable in the reformed Church ever since. Still the Protestants held on, in the far west of France, under the leadership of that Henry of Navarre who became King of France in 1589. To bring peace to his country he formally declared himself a Catholic, but he so favoured the cause of reform that two years before the end of the century he passed a famous measure, the Edict of Nantes, by which the French Protestants were granted freedom to think and act as they pleased in all religious matters, without penalty of any kind.