to interested influence, on the part of England and Holland, that he
attributes this declaration of war against Philip II., "into which," he
says, "the king allowed himself to be hurried against his own feelings."
It was assuredly in accordance with his own feelings and of his own free
will that Henry acted in this important decision; he had a political
order of mind greater, more inventive, and more sagacious than Rosny's
administrative order of mind, strong common sense and painstaking
financial abilities. To spontaneously declare war against Philip after
the capitulation of Paris and the conquest of three quarters of France
was to proclaim that the League was at death's door, that there was no
longer any civil war in France, and that her king had no more now than
foreign war to occupy him. To make alliance, in view of that foreign
war, with the Protestant sovereigns of England, Holland, and Germany,
against the exclusive and absolutist patron of Catholicism, was on the
part of a king but lately Protestant, and now become resolutely Catholic,
to separate openly politics from religion, and to subserve the temporal
interests of the realm of France whilst putting himself into the hands of
the spiritual head of the church as regarded matters of faith. Henry
IV., moreover, discovered another advantage in this line of conduct; it
rendered possible and natural the important act for which he was even
then preparing, and which will be spoken of directly, the edict of Nantes
in favor of the Protestants, which was the charter of religious tolerance
and the securities for it, pending the advent of religious liberty and
its rights, that fundamental principle, at this day, of moral and social
order in France. Such were Henry IV.'s grand and premonitory instincts
when, on the 17th of January, 1595, he officially declared against Philip
II. that war which Philip had not for a moment ceased to make on him.

The conflict thus solemnly begun between France and Spain lasted three
years and three months, from the 17th of January, 1595, to the 1st of