The court had not been long upon its tour through the provinces before Catherine de Medici discovered that the petition of the estates of Burgundy for the abolition of Protestant worship was not merely a local prejudice, but the sense of the provinces.[829] The elements of this public opinion were various: The clergy—not all, however—wanted the findings of the Council of Trent accepted _in toto_; all of them were dissatisfied with the recognition of the rights of the Protestants; the alienation of their lands was a grievance to the clergy, the more so because speculators had bought them at a low price because of the doubt as to the validity of the title.[830] The Guises were angry that the prosecution of Coligny for the murder of the duke had been abandoned.[831] Among high and low alike there were unprincipled folk who had hopes of profiting by confiscations and forfeitures imposed upon the Huguenots.[832] The queen mother was too good a politician not to pay heed to these signs of popular feeling, more especially as the voice of the provinces chimed with those in high authority, who not only urged that the war be renewed against the Protestants but also hinted broadly of foreign support in aid of the crown. At first Catherine answered graciously, yet guardedly, to the effect that a peace which had been so solemnly made, by the advice of the princes of the blood and the council, could not be too lightly cast aside. The miserable effects of the war were everywhere evident. Agriculture had almost ceased in a country famous for its fertility, and the whole country had been so plundered and harassed by both parties that the poor people, being stripped of all their substance, often preferred to fly to the forests rather than to remain continually exposed to the mercy of their enemies. Wandering soldiers and dissolute women, with stolen goods in their possession, infested the roads.[833] As to trade and manufacturing, the mechanic arts still were plied only in the largest and strongest towns; even here merchants and tradesmen had shut up shop and gone off to war, not always out of religious zeal, but in the hope of enriching themselves by spoliation. The nobility were divided; the clergy incensed. The civil war had been accompanied by the attendant aids of violence, robbery, murder, rape, and justice had not been administered in the courts for months. The very methods resorted to for the preservation of religion rendered it hateful in the eyes of many men of both parties. Both parties were bigoted in belief and in practice. The iconoclasm of the Protestants, who tore down church edifices hoary with age and sanctified by tradition, expelling the inmates, both male and female, if doing them no worse injury, familiarized society with changes wrought by violence and made the people callous to one of the most precious possessions of a nation—a reverence for tradition.[834]