A fundamentally contradictory problem; for the different liberties are closely connected, one with another, and have need to be security one for another; but, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, people were not so particular in point of consequence, and it was thought possible to give religious liberty its guarantees whilst refusing them to general political liberty.

That is what the Duke of Luynes attempted to do; to all the towns to which Henry IV.

had bound himself by the edict of Nantes, he made a promise of preserving to them their religious liberties, and he called upon them at the same time to remain submissive and faithful subjects of the sovereign kingship.

La Rochelle, Montauban, Saumur, Sancerre, Charite-sur-Loire, and St.Jean d'Angely were in this category; and it was to Montauban, as one of the most important of those towns, that Louis XIII.

first addressed his promise and his appeal, inconsistent one with the other.
Some years previously, in May, 1610, amidst the grief and anxiety awakened by the assassination of Henry IV.