But high above this policy, so thoroughly French, towered a question still more important than that of even the security and the grandeur of France; that was the partition of Europe between Catholicism and Protestantism; and it was in a country Catholic in respect of the great majority, and governed by a kingship with which Catholicism was hereditary, that, in order to put a stop to civil war between French Catholics and Protestants, Coligny pressed the king to put himself at the head of an essentially Protestant coalition, and make it triumphant in Europe.

This was, in the sixteenth century, a policy wholly chimerical, however patriotic its intention may have been; and the French Protestant hero who recommended it to Charles IX.

did not know that Protestantism was on the eve of the greatest disaster it would have to endure in France.
A fact of a personal character tended to mislead Coligny.

By his renown, by the loftiness of his views, by the earnest gravity of his character and his language he had produced a great effect upon Charles IX., a young king of warm imagination and impressible and sympathetic temperament, but, at the same time, of weak judgment.

He readily gave way, in Coligny's company, to outpourings which had all the appearance of perfect and involuntary frankness.