122 HISTORY OF FRANCE. [chap. which the French kings thought the right of the crown. By law they had no recognized existence ; their marriages were invahd, and their children were not esteemed legiti- mate. In none of the agreements which had been made had it ever been allowed that every man throughout the kingdom might attend either Catholic or Protestant wor- ship as he thought best. What had been done had always been only to allow the Huguenot worship in certain par- ticular places, and to allow the Huguenots to hold certain particular towns. No one had yet been able to make one law in these matters for the whole nation, and though Henry's settlement came nearer to it than any that had been made before, full religious equality was not even now earned out. Huguenots were indeed admitted to all civil rights and to all offices equally with Catholics. On the other hand, the Huguenot worship was allowed only in the cities where they already had "temples," and on the estates of Calvinist nobles of the higher class, 3,500 in number. To secure impartial justice, chambers were in- stituted for the Huguenots in the parliaments of all the pro- vinces where they were numerous, and they were allowed to keep all the cities they had garrisoned, to the number of two hundred, of which Rochelle and Montauban were the most important. Thus the Huguenots remained in some sort a distinct people from the rest of the nation, a state of things inconsistent alike with full national unity and with the full establishment of the royal power. The edict by which these changes were made, the famous Edict of Nantes, was signed on the 13th of April, 1598, but it was not published for a year, nor registered by the Parliament of Paris till the 2nd of Februarj', 1599. It was looked on as a temporary expedient to allow men's passions to cool, and, as the clergy hoped, to give them time to reclaim the Huguenots. In truth many did become Catholics : some indeed as time-servers, but many because the Church of France was rising out of the slough in which Calvin had found it. Some of the most admirable men who ever lived were then at work in it, and Henry encouraged them, although he continued to make a shameful use of the patronage of the crown. Nobles could obtain by a mere request for their younger sons, even in infancy, bishoprics, deaneries, and abbeys, these last sometimes empty ruins, with large estates attached to them. Henry's own life was a scandal. He had been utterly depraved under the training of_ Catharine de'
