Protestantism in France From Death of Francis I to Edict of Nantes - James Aitken Wylie

Pacifications that had been made only to be broken.
This was the third in the space of seven years.
Meanwhile the daughter of the Medici held out the
olive-branch: but so little was she trusted that none
of the Huguenot chiefs presented themselves at
court, nor did they even deem themselves secure in
their own castles; they retired in a body within the
strongly fortified city of La Rochelle.
Davila admits that the Protestants had good
grounds for these suspicions. The peace was the
gift of the Trojans; and from this time the shadow
of the St. Bartholomew massacre begins to darken
the historian's page. "The peace having been
concluded and established," says he, "the stratagem
formed in the minds of the king and queen for
bringing the principal Huguenots into the net began
now to be carried out, and they sought to compass
by policy that which had so often been attempted
by war, but which had been always found fruitless
and dangerous."[4] Davila favors us with a glimpse
of that policy, which it was hoped would gain what
force had not effected. The king "being now come
to the age of two-and-twenty, of a resolute nature, a
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