The Huguenots desired what is commonly known as liberty of conscience;
or, in other words, freedom to worship God according to their own views
of the truth, without interference or restriction. And in close alliance
with them were the Queen of England and the Protestant princes of
Germany.

Personal motives, irrespective of principle, united many persons and
families with either of these great parties which seemed most likely to
subserve their private ambitions. The feudal system was nearly extinct in
form, but its spirit was still alive. The nobles who had long held sway in
some of the provinces of France desired to hold them as distinct and
separate governments, and to transmit them as an inheritance to their
children. This motive often determined their political association.

During the most of the period of this long civil war, Catherine de Medicis
[12] was either regent or in the exercise of a controlling influence in the
government of France. She was a woman of commanding person and
extraordinary ability, skilful in intrigue, without conscience and without
personal religion. She hesitated at no crime, however black, if through it
she could attain the objects of her ambition. Neither of her three sons,
Francis, Charles, and Henry, who came successively to the throne, left any
legal heir to succeed him. The succession became, therefore, at an early
period, a question of great interest. If not the potent cause, it was
nevertheless intimately connected with most of the bloodshed of that bloody
period.

A solemn league was entered into by a large number of the ultra-Catholic
nobles to secure two avowed objects, the succession of a Catholic prince to
the throne, and the utter extermination of the Huguenots. Henry, King of
Navarre, afterwards Henry IV. of France, admitted to be the legal heir to