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concerned; the foundation o the English College, in which Loyola's Order trained priests ready to endure martyrdom for the Catholic defense and offense on the other side of the Channel; the Greek Col- lege, erected to serve the idea of winning back the Schismatics, and therefore staffed with Greek professors granted an indult to use a special rite; all these were his achievement. The money was taken from the treasury of the Papal States. "Every day," says the chron- icle, "old papers were examined in Rome, and every day new claims were made." But the use of force in order to levy taxes greatly ex- cited those who were affected; and under the protection of the nobles, victims of many a confiscatory action, the peasants mustered stiff op- position and the bandits took the law into their own hands.
The great theme of the Curial policy was the strengthening of Catholic powers against the monarchs who in England, France and the German countries upheld the Reformation. Spain and the Jesuits were used in all the attempts at Restoration, in so far as they did not for their part use the Papacy as a lever.
The political alliance between France and Reformation Germany had opened a new door to the new faith. Those French nobles or burghers who were of German descent adopted Calvinism and its idea of a corporative republic. The antagonism they created within the state came to a head under the Regency of Catherine of Medici. Niece of a Pope, she had joined forces with the Catholic family of Guise and her own husband's mistress in a plan to persecute the here- tics. Into these dark, smudgy depths of love affairs, egotistical ambi- tions and pseudo-religious impulses, Huguenot blood also flowed dur- ing St. Bartholomew's Eve, 1572, in Paris. The Vatican had had no part in this affair. But it was jubilant when misleading reports de- clared that a victory had been won for the Catholic cause. The Pope celebrated the event with a Te Deum and a procession, and ordered a memorial medal to be cast. The ethical attitude towards politics was the same in both camps. Admiral Coligny, the most important vic- tim of the massacre, had not intervened to prevent the murder of Duke Francois de Guise, though he had known it was to take place; and after- ward he praised the assassination as a supreme good fortune for France while Beza, the Calvinist theologian, lauded the murderer as the arm of a rescuing God.
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