The people had the right to conform to their ruler's creed, or to depart from his land.
Still, as a matter of fact, many of the princes being Reformers, a large mass of the population had acquired the privilege for their own generation and that of their children to practise that religion which they actually approved.

This was a fact, and a more comfortable one than the necessity of choosing between what they considered wicked idolatry and the stake--the only election left to their Netherland brethren.

In France, the accidental splinter from Montgomery's lance had deferred the Huguenot massacre for a dozen years.

During the period in which the Queen Regent was resolved to play her fast and loose policy, all the persuasions of Philip and the arts of Alva were powerless to induce her to carry out the scheme which Henry had revealed to Orange in the forest of Vincennes.

When the crime came at last, it was as blundering as it was bloody; at once premeditated and accidental; the isolated execution of an interregal conspiracy, existing for half a generation, yet exploding without concert; a wholesale massacre, but a piecemeal plot.
The aristocracy and the masses being thus, from a variety of causes, in this agitated and dangerous condition, what were the measures of the government?
The edict of 1550 had been re-enacted immediately after Philip's accession to sovereignty.