France, which being well united, as we now behold it, under the glorious reign of your Majesty, might give law to all the world, was upon the point of self-destruction, by the division which was raised in it by two fatal leagues of rebels; the one in the middle, and the other towards the latter end, of the last age. Heresy produced the first against the true religion;[17] ambition, under the masque of zeal, gave birth to the second, with pretence of maintaining what the other would have ruined: and both of them, though implacable enemies to each other, yet agreed in this, that each of them, at divers times, set up the standard of rebellion against our kings. The crimes of the former I have set forth in the history of Calvinism, which made that impious League in France, against the Lord and his anointed; and I discover the wickedness of the latter in this work, which I present to your Majesty, as the fruit of my exact obedience to those commands with which you have been pleased to honour me. I have endeavoured to perform them with so much the greater satisfaction to myself, because I believed that, in reading this history, the falsehood of some advantages which the Leaguers and Huguenots have ascribed to themselves, may be easily discerned. These by boasting, as they frequently do, even at this day, that they set the crown on the head of King Henry IV.; those, that their League was the cause of his conversion. I hope the world will soon be disabused of those mistakes; and that it will be clearly seen, that they were the Catholics of the royal party, who, next under God, produced those two effects, so advantageous to France. We are owing for neither of them to those two unhappy Leagues, which were the most dangerous enemies to the prosperity of the kingdom; and it is manifest at this present time, that the glory of triumphing over both of them, was reserved, by the Divine Providence, to our kings of the imperial stem of Bourbon. Henry IV. subdued and reduced the League of the false zealots, by the invincible force of his arms, and by the wonderful attractions of his clemency; Louis the Just disarmed that of the Calvinists, by the taking of Rochelle, and other places, which those heretics had moulded into a kind of commonwealth against their sovereign; and Louis the Great, without employing other arms than those of his ardent charity and incomparable zeal for the conversion of Protestants, accompanied by the justice of his laws,[18] has reduced it to that low condition, that we have reason to believe, we shall behold its ruin, by the repentance of those, who, being deluded and held back by their ministers, continue still in their erroneous belief, rather through ignorance than malice. And this it is which, when accomplished, will surpass even all those other wonders which daily are beheld, under your most auspicious government.