54 



THE FEENCH BLOOD IN AMERICA 



Henry of 

 Navarre 



Edict of 

 Nantes 



Louis XIV 



Revocation of 

 the Edict 



shocked the world, died at twenty-five, the prey of terror 

 and mental agony. 



VII 



When Henry of Navarre was made king of France he 

 found it politically necessary to abjure his Huguenot faith 

 and turn Catholic. But he never forgot his old allegiance 

 to the Reformed religion, and strove in every way to 

 give his former comrades their just rights as citizens of 

 France. On the thirteenth of April, 1598, he set his 

 name to " a perpetual and irrevocable edict," known as 

 the Edict of Nantes, which granted liberty of conscience 

 to all Frenchmen. It restored to the Huguenots their 

 full civil rights and gave them the freedom to worship 

 God unmolested by priests or bigots. It was one of the 

 most glorious steps towards human liberty that has ever 

 been taken, and had its solemn promises been adhered to 

 by Henry's royal successors, France would have been 

 spared some of the blackest and most unfortunate pas- 

 sages in her history. 



But after the death of Henry IV, the beneficent 

 provisions of the edict were one by one rendered in- 

 operative, and the old round of petty and cruel persecu- 

 tions was resumed. We must pass over these unhappy 

 years until we come to the crowning act of desj^otism 

 which marked the career of Roman Catholic intolerance, 

 the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1685 Louis 

 XIV utterly destroyed the few remaining liberties of his 

 Protestant subjects by breaking the solemn promises 

 made to them by Henry IV. According to the terms of 

 the Revocation all Huguenot churches were to be torn 

 down, the gathering of Protestants for the purposes of 

 worship was forbidden, even religious services in the 

 home were made punishable offenses. Protestant schools 

 were abolished, all children were to be brought up in 

 the Roman Catholic faith and were to be baptized by tlie 

 parish priest, etc. Most tyrannical of all the provisions, 

 however, was that which forbade any Huguenot from 



