For the Lutherans were not disposed to recognise the victims of Charles IX. as martyrs for the Protestant cause. During the wars of religion Lutheran auxiliaries were led by a Saxon prince, a margrave of Baden, and other German magnates, to aid the Catholic forces in putting down the heresy of Calvin. These feelings were so well known that the French Government demanded of the Duke of Wirtemberg the surrender of the Huguenots who had fled into his dominions.[168] Lutheran divines flattered themselves at first with the belief that it was the Calvinistic error, not the Protestant truth, that had invited and received the blow.[169] The most influential of them, Andreae, declared that the Huguenots were not martyrs but rebels, who had died not for religion but sedition; and he bade the princes beware of the contagion of their spirit, which had deluged other lands with blood. When Elizabeth proposed a league for the defence of Protestantism, the North German divines protested against an alliance with men whose crime was not only religious error but blasphemous obstinacy, the root of many dreadful heresies. The very proposal, they said, argued a disposition to prefer human succour rather than the word of God.[170] When another invitation came from Henry of Navarre, the famous divine Chemnitz declared union with the disciples of Calvin a useless abomination.[171] The very men whose own brethren had perished in France were not hearty or unanimous in execrating the deed.[172] There were Huguenots who thought that their party had brought ruin on itself, by provoking its enemies, and following the rash counsels of ambitious men.[173] This was the opinion of their chief, Theodore Beza, himself. Six weeks before, he wrote that they were gaining in numbers but losing in quality, and he feared lest, after destroying superstition, they should destroy religion: "Valde metuo ne superstitioni successerit impietas."[174] And afterwards he declared that nobody who had known the state of the French Protestants could deny that it was a most just judgment upon them.[175]