The history of the rise and decline of the Huguenot movement is a melancholy record of persecution and of heroism.

How great the number of martyrs was can never be known accurately.

Apart from St.Bartholomew there were several lesser massacres, the wear and tear of a generation of war, and {230} the unremitting pressure of the law that claimed hundreds of victims a year.
[Sidenote: Hostility of government] Three principal causes can be assigned for the failure of the Reformation to do more than fight a drawn battle in France.

The first and least important of these was the steady hostility of the government.

This hostility was assured by the mutually advantageous alliance between the throne and the church sealed in the Concordat of Bologna of 1516.