field, with seven hundred and forty churches in the various provinces for
their places of worship, with all the best fortresses in France in their
possession, with leaders like Rohan, Lesdiguieres, Bouillon, and many
others, and with the most virtuous, self-denying, Christian government,
established and maintained by themselves, it would be madness for him
and his dynasty to deny the Protestants their political and religious
liberty, or to attempt a crusade against their brethren in the
Netherlands.

France was far more powerful than Spain, although the world had not yet
recognised the fact. Yet it would have been difficult for both united to
crush the new commonwealth, however paradoxical such a proposition seemed
to contemporaries.

Sully was conscientiously in favour of peace, and Sully was the one great
minister of France. Not a Lerma, certainly; for France was not Spain,
nor was Henry IV. a Philip III. The Huguenot duke was an inferior
financier to his Spanish contemporary, if it were the height of financial
skill for a minister to exhaust the resources of a great kingdom in
order to fill his own pocket. Sully certainly did not neglect his own
interests, for be had accumulated a fortune of at least seventy thousand
dollars a year, besides a cash capital estimated at a million and a half.
But while enriching himself, he had wonderfully improved the condition of
the royal treasury. He had reformed many abuses and opened many new
sources of income. He had, of course, not accomplished the whole Augean
task of purification. He was a vigorous Huguenot, but no Hercules, and
demigods might have shrunk appalled at the filthy mass of corruption
which great European kingdoms everywhere presented to the reformer's eye.
Compared to the Spanish Government, that of France might almost have been
considered virtuous, yet even there everything was venal.