the country, and, in the minority of the King, a stand was made at
last.

The last semblance of popular institutions existed in the Parliaments
of this was the old feudal Council of the Counts of Paris, consisting
of the temporal and spiritual peers of the original county, who had
the right to advise with their chief, and to try the causes
concerning themselves. The immediate vassals of the King had a right
to sit there, and were called Paris De France, in distinction from
the other nobles who only had seats in the Parliament in whose
province their lands might lie. To these St. Louis, in his anxiety
to repress lawlessness, had added a certain number of trained lawyers
and magistrates; and these were the working members of these
Parliaments, which were in general merely courts of justice for civil
and criminal causes. The nobles only attended on occasions of
unusual interest. Moreover, a law or edict of the King became valid
on being registered by a Parliament. It was a moot question whether
the Parliament had the power to baffle the King by refusing to
register an edict, and Henry IV. had avoided a refusal from the
Parliament of Paris, by getting his edict of toleration for the
Huguenots registered at Nantes.

The peculiarly oppressive house-tax, with four more imposts proposed
in 1648, gave the Parliament of Paris the opportunity of trying to
make an effectual resistance by refusing the registration. They were
backed by the municipal government of the city at the Hotel de Ville,
and encouraged by the Coadjutor of the infirm old Archbishop of
Paris, namely, his nephew, Paul de Gondi, titular Bishop of Corinth
in partibus infidelium, a younger son of the Duke of Retz, an Italian
family introduced by Catherince de Medici. There seemed to be a hope