The late king, Henry, had made a decree in the month of June, 1559, being then at Ecouen, by which the judges were bound to sentence all Lutherans to death, and which was published and confirmed by all the Parliaments, without any limitation or modification whatever, and with a warning to the judges not to mitigate the penalty, as they had done for some years previously.

Different judgments were pronounced upon the decree: those who took the most political and most zealous view of religion considered that it was necessary, as well to preserve and maintain the Catholic religion as to keep down the seditious, who, under the cloak of religion, were doing all they could to upset the political condition of the kingdom.

Others, who cared nothing for religion, or for the state, or for order in the body politic, also thought the decree necessary, not at all for the purpose of exterminating the Protestants, -- for they held that it would tend to multiply them,--but because it would offer a means of enriching themselves by the confiscations ensuing upon condemnation, and because the king would thus be able to pay off forty-two millions of livres which he owed, and have money in hand, and, besides that, satisfy those who were demanding recompense for the services they had rendered the crown, wherein many placed their hopes." [_Memoires de Michael de Castelnau, in the Petitot collection,_ Series I., t.xxxiii.

pp.

24-27.] The Guises were, in the sixteenth century, the representatives and the champions of these different cliques and interests, religious or political, sincere in their belief or shameless in their avidity, and all united under the flag of the Catholic church.