SECTION IV

Heroism and Tragedy

This section comprises chapters 25 through 36. They are listed below. To go directly to any particular chapter click on the link to that chapter. Otherwise you can scroll down as you read chapter by chapter.

Chapter 25    The Massacre of St. Bartholomew   
Chapter 26    The Triumph of Rochelle   
Chapter 27    Vicissitudes   
Chapter 28    The League   
Chapter 29    The War of the Three Henries   
Chapter 30    The Double Assassination   
Chapter 31    The White Plume of Navarre   
Chapter 32    The Edict of Nantes   
Chapter 33    Richelieu   
Chapter 34    The Dragonades   
Chapter 35   The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes   
Chapter 36    A Resume   

The preachers in Geneva and the cardinals at Rome foresaw and predicted a catastrophe from the abnormal political situation at Paris. The radical antipathy between the rival parties who stood nudging each other's elbows at the Louvre, with reconciliation painted on their faces, but hatred still unsubdued in their hearts, could not but forebode evil.

Yet, unmindful of the petulant murmurs of the king, oblivious of the old threats which had issued from Bayonne, the Huguenot leaders still lingered at the court, while one more act was played in the dreary comedy which ushered in the awful tragedy of St. Bartholomew. On the 18th of August, Prince Henry and Margaret de Valois were married.

The young duke of Guise had cherished the hope of marrying the king's sister; he had long entertained a violent passion for her, while her affection for him was equally undisguised. But mutual affection was compelled to succumb to vicious state policy, and the wedding was consummated.

It had been agreed that the ceremonial of the marriage should not be wholly conformable to either creed: not to the Protestant, because the vows were to be received by a priest; the cardinal of Bourbon; not to the Romish, because those vows were to be received without the sacramental ceremonies of the Vatican. A great scaffold was erected in the court before the principal entrance of the cathedral of Notre Dame; and standing upon this typical structure, the inauspicious nuptials were celebrated. It was remarked by many that when the princess was asked if she were willing to take king Henry of Navarre to be her husband, she stood obstinately silent; she had said repeatedly that Guise alone should be her husband. But the king her brother, who stood just behind her, with his own hand rudely inclined her head, and this was taken for Margaret's assent. This done, the bridegroom retired into a neighboring Huguenot chapel, while the reluctant bride passed into the cathedral with a bitter and broken heart to listen to the mockery of the mass. In the evening the coldly indifferent husband and the sulky spouse attended the brilliant festival with which Charles crowned the dismal day.

From this time horrible events begin to jostle each other. Four days after the wedding, an attempt was made to assassinate the admiral as he was returning from one of his daily interviews with the king at the Louvre. He was fired at from a window screened by a certain. Coligny was indebted for his life to an accidental movement made at the moment; but as it was, his left arm was broken, and the index finger of his right hand was shot off. With imperturbable sang froid the old soldier pointed out the house from whence the bullet sped; but ere his suite could break open the gate, the assassin had escaped.

This assault caused a profound commotion. The hostile mob of Paris, which had only borne the presence of the Huguenots with suppressed fury, now heaved in almost open insurrection. Navarre and Condé, supported by the whole Protestant party, presented a petition for justice and protection; and the king, who was playing at tennis when the news reached him, threw down the racket in a violent rage, muttered something about immature action, and exclaimed, "Must I be perpetually troubled by broils; shall I never have quiet?"

Active measures were then taken to allay suspicion, to quell the rising tumult, and to flatter the angered Huguenots into renewed stupefaction.

Coligny, who had been borne to his apartments by his attendants, weltering in his blood, was shortly visited by the king, the queen mother, Anjou, and many of the chief nobility. Every expression of condolence was uttered, signal vengeance upon the assassin was promised, the police were ordered to make domiciliary visits and arrest all suspected persons, and his majesty even carried his hypocrisy so far as openly to notify his high displeasure at the occurrence to all the public ambassadors.

This energetic action at once disarmed the suspicion and conciliated the respect of the Huguenot chiefs. Startled Paris resumed its tranquility, and that awful hush which precedes a storm succeeded.

Meantime, warned by this émuete of the danger which lurked in procrastination, perfectly well aware that every hour lost was an opportunity for misfortune, the conspirators worked with diabolical zeal to complete the preparations for the wholesale slaughter, and the time was definitively fixed—the 23rd of August, 1572, the eve of St. Bartholomew's day. A pistol was to be fired in front of the Louvre as the signal for the commencement of the butchery.

A few of the Huguenots were alarmed, and boldly proposed to quit Paris with the admiral. The Vidame of Chartres strongly advised this course. He even informed Coligny that the Guises, despite their ostensible disgrace at court, had been twice seen in masks at the Louvre in secret conversation with Catharine and the king. "We have been shamefully ensnared," he added.

Coligny was averse to showing any suspicion. "If I do so," said he, "I must display either fear or distrust: my honor would be hurt by the one; the king, I hope, would be injured by the other. Besides, I should then be obliged to renew the civil war, and I would rather die than again see such ills."

The shrewd Vidame, however, was not to be persuaded, and accompanied by a number of equally wise friends, among whom were Rohan and Montgomery, he passed out of the fatal city.

Under pretence of protecting the admiral and his friends from any tumult which the Guises might stir among the populace, the whole Huguenot faction were lodged in one quarter of the city, and the chiefs were huddled together for the double purpose of preventing their escape and beeping them under easy surveillance. Perhaps too Charles called to mind the pithy maxim of Alaric: "Thick grass is easier mown than thin." Around this doomed quarter was drawn a cordon of the duke of Anjou's guards, professedly to protect the victims, but who shortly became their most zealous murderers. At the same time arms were profuselv delivered to the canaille of the metropolis, previously crazed by the clamors of the Jesuits, and these were hidden in the slums of the capital. Finally, couriers were dispatched to all parts of France with orders to make the massacre general and exterminating.

France was commanded to commit suicide. The kingdom was to stagger and bleed beneath self-dealt and frenzied blows.

The awful eve arrived. At midnight the pistol shot was fired; the talismanic word was uttered. Charles cried, Havoc, and let slip the thunderbolt. The wild populace swayed through the streets, crying, "Blood, blood!" The protecting guard of the Huguenot quarter was suddenly transformed into a legion of demoniacs. "Bleed, bleed!" shouted Tavannes; "the physicians say that bleeding is as good in August as in May." The dukes of Guise and Montpensier rode through the streets, crying, "It is the will of the king; slay on to the last, and let not one escape." The count. of Coconnas seized thirty prisoners, put them in prison, and put them to death with his own hand by slow and lingering tortures.

The butcher Pezon, who slaughtered men, women, and children as he did cattle, boasted of having in one day killed a hundred and twenty Huguenots. René, Catharine's perfumer, frequented all the gaols in which the evangelicals were immured, and amused himself by stabbing them with daggers. He decoyed a rich jeweler into his house, under pretext of saving him; but after plundering his person, René cut his victim's threat, and threw the body into the Seine. "This arm," said Cruce, a gold-wire drawer, taking off his coat and exhibiting his naked arm, "on the day of St. Bartholomew, put to death four hundred heretics." At the first signal the duke of Guise sped for the residence of the admiral, pausing but to ring the great bell of the palace, which was only tolled on days of public rejoicing. He was accompanied by his two creatures, Petrucci, an Italian, and Bérne, a German bravo; a company of men-at-arms also followed. The bravos rushed into the chamber of the helpless admiral, who, awaked by the noise, had just arisen from his bed and now stood leaning against the wall of his apartment. "What means the tumult?" queried he of his attendants. "My lord," was the solemn reply, "God calls us to himself." The admiral then bade his suite to leave him. "I cannot escape; it is all over with me; I have long been prepared for death; but save yourselves, dear friends." Such were the collected and noble words of this martyr, whose spirit, armed by faith in God, no danger could quell. Coligny's attendants at once quitted him, while he composed himself in prayer.

Unmoved by the entrance of the assassins, he continued his supplications. Awed by the grandeur of the scene, the majestic figure of the calm and venerable old soldier engrossed in devotion, Petrucci instinctively paused. "Art thou Coligny?" demanded the bravo. "I am indeed," responded the admiral. "Young man, you should have respect unto my gray hairs: but work your will; you can abridge my life only by a few short days."

A moment later, and Gaspard de Coligny, the foremost subject in France, the most distinguished man in Christendom, lay dead.

Bérne plunged his sword into Coligny's body, and his companions then gave him multitudinous stabs with their stiletto. "Your enemy is dead," cried Petrucci from the window to the duke of Guise, who awaited the dénouement impatiently in the court below. "Very well," was the answer, borne up through the midnight gloom; "but M. d'Angouléme will not believe it until he sees the body at his feet." The next instant the corpse, flung from the window, fell with a thud at the feet of the princes; the yet warm blood even spurted out on the clothes and into the faces of the disbelievers. With brutal nonchalance Guise stooped and wiped Coligny's face, then ordered his satellites to hold a torch, that he might recognize his foe. When, through the lurid and flickering gloom, he detected that it was indeed the mighty admiral who lay before him, he spurned the body with his foot, and ordered the head to be cut off. This was sent to Catharine: what disposition she made of it is uncertain; Tavannes and Felibien affirm that it was dispatched to Rome; others say that Philip II of Spain received the ghastly present. The decapitated body was mangled and drawn through the streets during two or three days; the populace then threw it into the river, but afterwards drew it out and hung it by the heels to the gibbet of Montfaucon; a slow fire was then kindled beneath it, which disfigured it horribly.

The body swung from this gibbet when Charles went with his court to gloat over the abused remains of that man whom he had so recently termed "his father," and assured of his affectionate veneration. The odor emitted by the decomposing body was so dreadful, that the courtiers stopped their noses with their handkerchiefs. "Fie, fie!" cried Charles, borrowing the language of the classic brute Vitellius : "The carcass of an enemy always smells pleasantly."

Marshal Montmorenci, Coligny's cousin, had these insulted remains cut down one night, and secreted, for he feared to inter them at Chantilly, lest they should be molested. Subsequently, when the decrees against the admiral's memory were reversed, they were buried in the tomb of his ancestors at Chatillon-sur-Loing.

While Coligny's murder was being perpetrated, the drunken pavements of bewildered Paris were glutted in blood. The Huguenots, surprised and overmatched, could make no resistance. Escape was impossible; the city gates were shut and guarded; numerous lights, placed in the windows of the dwellings, deprived the reformers even of the normal protection of night; and patrols traversed the streets in all directions, butchering every one they met. From the streets, as the carnival grew wilder, the frenzied multitude swept into the houses. Neither age, sex, nor condition were spared. Priests, holding a crucifix in one land and a sword in the other, preceded the murderers, encouraging them to butcher alike relatives and friends, and promising them absolution from all crimes and heavenly happiness as the reward of these "acts of devotion."

Even the Louvre became the scene of great carnage; the king's guards were drawn up in double line, and the Huguenots who lodged in the palace were summoned out one after another and killed with the halberds of the infuriated soldiers. Most of them died without complaining; others appealed to the public faith and the sacred promise of the king. "Great God," cried they, "be the defense of the oppressed. Just Judge, avenge this perfidy."

While these events were occurring in the courtyard, Charles, seated at a window of the Louvre, amused himself by shooting down all who came within range of his musket.

The monarch's ferocity was contagious; even the ladies of his court were seen descending into the square of the Louvre, then filled with the dead bodies of Huguenot gentlemen, many of whom had cheerfully passed with them some hours of the preceding day. It was by their siren-like qualities that some of the victims had been enticed to their death; they now became harpies, through the addition of cruelty to fanaticism and wantonness, and trampling common decency under foot, they jested and laughed as they recognized the murdered Huguenots, precisely as the king did from the window of the Louvre, and beneath the gibbet of Montfaucon.

Among those who fled within the precincts of the palace was a nobleman named Soubise, whose wife had recently instituted a suit of divorce against him. His mangled body underwent a careful examination from these brazen wantons, whose barbarous curiosity was worthy of such an abominable court.

When day dawned, Paris exhibited an appalling spectacle of slaughter: headless bodies were dangling from innumerable windows; gateways were blocked up by the dead and dying; the houses were battered, while the doors were smeared with gore; and the streets were filled with carcasses, which were drawn, bleeding and mutilated, across the bloody pavements to the choked and reddened Seine.

These atrocious scenes were continued through three days and nights, and the orgies only slackened from lack of victims.

Meantime the massacre spread throughout France; the reeling kingdom bled at every pore with mute heroism. The slaughter at Meaux, Angers, Bourges, Orleans, Lyons, Toulouse, Rouen, and in many of the smaller towns of the provinces, was horrible.

But the genius of humanity had not wholly fled from France. Claude de Savoy, count of Tende, saved the lives of all the Huguenots in Dauphiny. "This missive," said he when the king's letter ordering the massacre was handed to him, "must be a forgery, and I shall so treat it."

Eleoner de Chabat, count of Charny, who commanded in Burgundy, acted with similar heroism; there was but one Huguenot murdered at Dijon.

Heran de Montouvin, governor of Auvergne, positively refused to obey the mandate, unless it were supported by the personal presence of the king.

The Viscount d'Ortes, the governor of Bayonne, penned this immortal response to the royal order "Sire, I base communicated your majesty's mandate to our faithful inhabitants in this city, and to the men-at-arms in the garrison. I find here good citizens and brave soldiers, but not one executioner. On this point, therefore, you must not expect obedience from me."

But despite these luminous exceptions, from seventy to a hundred thousand victims were slaughtered, and the lives of two of the heroes who refused obedience to the bloody fiat of Charles IX—the Count de Tende and the Viscount d'Ortes—were abridged by the infernal skill of the royal poisoner.

Both the Romish and the Huguenot chroniclers of this tragedy have bequeathed to posterity many episodes of personal adventure, which are replete with thrilling interest. But after "supping full of horrors," the imagination wearies and palls. Details grow hideous. "The deep damnation of their taking off" appalls those who peruse the history of the Huguenots; readers have no appetite for minutae.

It was long a mooted question whether Condé and young Henry of Navarre should be saved or not. Upon this point the testimony is clear. "It was anxiously deliberated," says the archbishop of Paris, "whether the prince should be murdered with the others; the conspirators were for their death; nevertheless they escaped by a miracle." "The duke of Guise," remarks Davila, "Wished that, in killing the Huguenots, Henry of Navarre and the Prince de Condé should be included; but the queen mother and others had a horror of dipping their lands in royal blood." "Indubitably," says quaint old Brantome, "they were proscribed and down on the 'red list,' as they called it, because it was remarked that it was necessary to dig up the roots of the heretical faction, Navarre, Condé, the admiral, and other noted personages; but the young queen Margaret threw herself upon her knees before king Charles her brother, to beg her husband's life at Catharine's command. The king granted it to her after much urging, since she was his good sister."

Margaret, in the account she gave of the horrors of the night which ushered in the massacre, relates that "on retiring to rest, Henry's bed was surrounded by thirty or forty Huguenots, who talked all night of the accident to the admiral, and resolved the next morning to demand justice upon the Guises. No sleep was had; and before day the king of Navarre rose, with the intention of playing at tennis until king Charles was up."

Margaret then narrates that she fell asleep after the retirement of Henry and his suite, but that in less than an hour she was awakened by loud shouts in the palace corridors, and by a man striking with hands and feet against the door of her room, and crying "'Navarre, Navarre!" Thinking it might be her husband, she opened the door, when lo, a man besmeared with gore rushed in, and clasping her by the feet, conjured her to save him. This cavalier was quickly pursued by four soldiers, from whose greedy swords the young queen with difficulty saved her strange client. At length his life was spared to her prayers, and she was conducted to the chamber of her sister the duchess of Lorraine, where, at the very moment of her entrance, a gentleman was killed just at her side.

Margaret fainted: upon her recovery she inquired for her husband, and was told that both Henry and Condé were then in the presence of the king.

When the princes were summoned to the king, Catherine, in order to affright them into submission, ordered them to be conducted under the palace vaults, and to be made to pass through the royal guards drawn up in files on either side, and poised in menacing attitudes.

"Charles received them," says Sully, "with a fierce countenance and a valley of blasphemies. He avowed that the admiral and the other heretics had been slaughtered by his mandate; affirmed that he would no longer be thwarted or questioned by his subjects; declared that all should revere him as the likeness of God, and be no longer the enemies of his mother's images; and ended by calling on the princes to recant."

" Sire," replied Condé with noble candor, "I am accountable to God alone for my religion; my possessions, my life, these are in your majesty's power; dispose of them as you please; but no menaces, nor even death, shall make me renounce the truth.''

"And you, sir," said Charles with bitter emphasis, turning to prince Henry, "what say you ?"

Henry expressed the same determination, though less frankly. "Well, sirs," said the king, "I give you three days in which to consider; then the mass, death, or the Bastille; take your choice."

Charles then gave way to sardonic glee. "Have I not played my part well?" asked he of Catherine de' Medici. "He who cannot dissemble is not fit to reign," said Louis XI. "Have not I known how to dissemble?" queried Charles, quoting this precept; "have not I well learned the lesson and the Latin of my ancestor, king Louis XI?"

Thus the hideous fête of St. Bartholomew closed with a laugh and a sarcasm.

The slaughter was complete. The heads of the most distinguished Huguenot families in France were the victims of the holocaust. Coligny, Rochefoucault and his son Teligny, the admiral's son-in-law Briquemont and his sons, Plauviant, Bemy, Clermont, Lavardin, Caumont de la Force, and many thousand more gallant gentlemen and Christian soldiers, formed the trophies of the fanatics. The zealous reformer of the University, La Rameé, hunted out in his hiding-place by one of his colleagues whose ignorance he had frequently exposed, was surrendered up to a gang of hired assassins.

Nor did fanaticism alone sharpen the sword and direct the dagger. Defendants in actions at law assassinated the plaintiffs, debtors slaughtered their creditors, jealous lovers butchered their rivals. It was a combination of religious frenzy, private vengeance, and public condemnation such as the world has never seen since the days of Sulla's proscriptions.

When the ghastly saturnalia had continued through a week, Pibrac, the king's advocate, waited upon his majesty to inquire whether he would be pleased to have the "joyous" event registered in Parliament, to perpetuate its memory. The lawyer also begged that the "revels" might be discontinued. To both these propositions Charles acceded, and orders were given by sound of trumpet forbidding further murder.

Shortly after proclamations were issued in which the king assumed the responsibility of the massacre, which he declared that he had ordered; affirming that Coligny and his associates had plotted regicide; branding the admiral's memory as infamous, confiscating his property, degrading his family to plebeian rank, ordering his body—and if that could not be found, his effigy—to be drawn on a hurdle, hung up at the Place de Gréve, and then fixed on the gibbet of Montfaucon. Coligny's portraits and arms were commanded to be destroyed wherever they could be seized, by the public executioner; and his residence at Chatillon-sur-Loing was to be razed, and the trees cut down to within four feet of the earth. The decree concluded by declaring that in future the anniversary of St. Bartholomew should be celebrated by public processions and, feus de joie.

It was perhaps honestly believed that these spiteful and abortive insults would affect the posthumous fame of the illustrious admiral, thrice honored by the stigmatization of such a king.

In the conduct of Charles IX it is difficult to decide whether his atrocity or his dissimulation is most detestable. His own edicts, which closely followed one another, were ridiculously contradictory; and it is asserted by a Romish partisan that the day after the publication of the edict commanding tranquility, he dispatched courtiers of note to the larger provincial cities with verbal orders to continue the fête despite the proclamation.

These orders were quite unnecessary; the unslaked rage of the fanaticized multitude was not to be suppressed by a parchment fiat. From time to time the "Paris matins," as the massacre was called—a name suggested by the "Sicilian vespers"—were renewed; the tocsin sounded everywhere, and the sans-culottes stormed the houses of the Huguenots with undiminished ardor, robbing, murdering, and ravishing with the talismanic cry, "The king desires and commands it."

The minds of men were filled with wild fantasies, which made them fear even themselves, and caused the very elements to appear fraught with terror. In after years, Henry IV used openly to relate, that during the seven nights which immediately succeeded the slaughter, flocks of ravens perched upon the eaves of the Louvre, and croaked loudly and lugubriously, always commencing as the palace clock tolled twelve.

Henry mentions another prodigy still more extraordinary: "For several days before the massacre commenced, I noticed, while playing at dice with the dukes of Alencon and Guise, that drops of blood clotted upon the table: twice I tried to wipe them off, when they reappeared; upon which, seized with horror, I quitted the game."

About eight days after the slaughter, Charles IX summoned his Huguenot brother-in-law to his bedside at midnight in great haste. Henry found him as he had sprung from his couch, filled with terror at a wild tumult of confused voices which resounded through the chamber. Henry himself imagined that he heard these sounds; they appeared like distant shrieks and howlings, mingled with the indistinguishable raging of a furious multitude, with wails and groans and smothered curses, as on the day of the massacre. Messengers were dispatched into the city to ascertain whether any new tumult lad broken out, but these returned with the assurance that Paris was quiet, and that the commotion was in the air. Henry could never recall this scene—the affrighted courtiers huddled in the middle of the room, the half-distracted king, and the agonized wail of the phantom voices—without a horror that made his hair stand on end.

Thus, for his share in the awful "pageant" of St. Bartholomew, the weak and too late affrighted king was tortured by the reproachful visions of his distempered imagination, compelled...

"To groan and sweat under a weary life," 

...while conscience gradually stung him into an untimely grave. 

The massacre of St. Bartholomew created an unprecedented sensation throughout Christendom. Affrighted Europe, frozen with horror, stood on tiptoe gazing towards France, and asking with white lips, "What next?"

This was regarded as the signal for a general crusade against Protestantism.

Even the maiden queen of England was far from esteeming her insulated position to be a guarantee of safety. She was familiar with the tortuous morality of the Vatican. She had already experienced the character of Romish intrigues in the different maneuvers made to unseat her and install Mary queen of Scots in her throne. The pretended rupture between France and Spain, which had cozened the profound penetration of Coligny, vanished as soon as its object was accomplished. Elizabeth feared either an immediate attack from Philip II, or a general revolt of the papists in Great Britain.

Fénélon was then the French ambassador at the court of St. James. Upon being summoned into Elizabeth's presence to present the dispatches of his king, which represented this monstrous act of treason against his subjects as the offspring of necessity, Fénélon blushed at being a Frenchman. When he attended the hall of audience, he found the whole court arrayed in deep mourning; a gloomy silence was preserved; no friendly eye was turned towards him; every countenance was mournful and downcast. He approached the queen, who neither rose from her throne nor extended her hand, as was the courtesy of the times. Elizabeth read the documents with marked displeasure, and broke the stillness only to express her astonishment and indignation.

A cry of horror rang though Germany and the Low Countries. Many writings were published, all denouncing the massacre, which was justly characterized as a compound of trickery, perfidy, and atrocity, exceeding in turpitude all that had ever been perpetrated in the annals of tyranny.

The court of France was the more sensitive to these animadversions, as negotiations were then pending to secure the crown of Poland for the duke of Anjou. It was feared that the prejudices and antipathies of the neighboring Germans might frustrate these expectations. Accordingly a deputation was sent to the Protestant princes to disarm their resentment.

The pleas of justification were as various as they were absurd. Sometimes the whole transaction was defended by citing the odious maxim of Innocent III, more recently decreed by the Council of Constance and adopted by the Jesuits, that no faith need be kept with heretics. Some condemned in part, and extenuated in part; while others regretted the event, but denounced what they were pleased to term Coligny's regicidal intentions, borrowing the "buncombe" of their king. But these lame explanations, these limping apologies, were not able to stand on their own feet. Such absurdities produced but little effect in the outraged Netherlands and in angered Germany, where the assassins of the Huguenots were always held in undisguised abhorrence.

There were two courts which received the news from Paris with acclamations. At home diabolical joy was manifested. Cannon were fired, bonfires blazed, the city was illuminated as if to celebrate a glorious achievement, and a solemn mass was intoned, at which pope Gregory XIII personally officiated, with all the imposing ceremony of the papal church. The cardinal of Lorraine, who was resident minister of France at the Vatican, questioned the messenger like a person informed beforehand; and a medal was struck, bearing on one side the head of Gregory XIII, and on the other the exterminating angel smiting the Huguenots, with the legend, "Huguenotorum Strages, 1572."

Thus Rome embalmed the massacre in barbarous Latin.

Yet despite his processions, his high masses celebrated in St. Peter's, and his honorary medals, it is said that the pontiff shed tears when he listened to the private recital of the excesses which smeared France with fraternal gore. "I cannot but weep," said Gregory, "when I think how many of the innocent must have suffered with the guilty." The abbé Anquétil cites these words, and observes, "A sentiment of compassion not incompatible with those public demonstrations which policy required." But it has been justly said that this is a dangerous morality which permits a jubilant exultation in public over a crime which is condemned in privacy, which distinguishes between the natural and the artificial man, and throws the mantle of hypocrisy over the spotless form of shrinking virtue.

It was at Madrid that the horrible crime was welcomed with the loudest plaudits. Philip II, the dark and gloomy bigot whose habitual demeanor was as frigid as the outside of a sepulchre, then showed for the first time that he could be sensible to joy. The somber gravity which had been proof against Alva's cruelty, which had given no outward sign of pleasure when the great naval victory of Lepanto crippled the Ottoman, now quite forsook him, and his black heart gloated over the streams of blood which had reddened the streets of Paris. He made magnificent presents to the courier who brought him the thrice-welcome news, wrote an autograph letter of congratulation to Charles IX., caroused with his courtiers, rejoiced in public, ordered Te Demn to be chanted, and summoned all the functionaries of the state to wait on him and tender their felicitations.

The admiral of Castile read the French dispatches at table, thinking to increase the festivity of the occasion. "Prythee, good admiral, were Coligny and his friends Christians?" queried the young duke den Infantado, who was seated among the guests. "Undoubtedly," replied the admiral. "Why then," rejoined the young prince, "since they were Christians, were they butchered like wild beasts?" "Gently, gently, my prince," said the admiral, "know you not that war in France means peace in Spain?"

But while agitated Europe was commenting thus variously upon the massacre of St. Bartholomew, France, plagued once again by those ills which Coligny so pathetically deprecated, was plunged in civil war. The pacificatory results which the court crazily imagined would ensue, failed to appear; it was divinely fired that the sowers of the wind should reap the whirlwind.

To slaughter the representatives of an idea even in hecatombs does not extinguish the principle, does not settle controverted points, does not weaken the right of private judgment. Moreover, the massacre of the Huguenots, extensive as it was, was very far from an extermination. Thousands survived the bloody deluge; and seeking asylums in the Netherlands, in the German duchies, and in England, they still had faith in God, and bided his good time.

Others, making no effort to quit France, fortified themselves in Montauban, in Nîmes, in Rochelle; and these three towns, forming themselves into a confederation, declared their union an independent republic—imperium in imperio.

"The court," says the abbé Crillon, "thought to have drowned Calvinism in the blood of its chief defenders; but that hydra soon regained its vigor." The Huguenots were indeed so far from being crushed, that they speedily put eighteen thousand well equipped and devoted men-at-arms in the field, and became masters of a hundred towns.

The court made strenuous exertions to throttle the infant confederation. Three armies were levied. One, under La Chastre, was employed to reduce Sancerre; D'Amville Montmorenci, with another, undertook to choke the émeute in Languedoc; while the third, commanded by Villars, the new admiral of France, was sent into Guyeure. Besides these, there were the forces under Strozzy and Montluc's army.

It was determined that Rochelle, now, as always before, the Huguenot citadel, should be conquered at all hazards. After various intrigues to foist upon the Rochelloise a Romanist governor, all of which were foiled by the been inhabitants, the city was besieged by an immense army, officered by Strozzy and Bovin, accompanied by the duke of Anjou.

Rochelle had long been one of the first maritime cities in France. It was well known to the early English merchants under the name of the "White Town," as they called it, from its appearance when the sun shone and was reflected from its rocky coasts. It was also much frequented by the Netherlanders. There were merchants among the Rochelloise who had each as many as ten ships at sea at one time.

Ever since the period of the English wars for the French succession, Rochelle had enjoyed extraordinary municipal franchises. It had by its own unaided power revolted from the English dominion; and for this heroism Charles V, in his customary manner, conferred upon the burghers valuable privileges; among others, that of independent jurisdiction in the city.

Rochelle exhibited Protestant sympathies at an early period. Habituated to civil liberty, intelligent and self-reliant, the citizens were excellently well prepared to accept the Reformation; and when a Genevese preacher arrived there in 1556, on his return from an unsuccessful missionary enterprise to Brazil, he found no difficulty in building up a prosperous church among the Rochelloise. With the rough and hardy population, habituated to the sea, a teacher like this, who had boldly performed his voyage across the ocean to serve God, was sure of a generous reception. In all the reactionary changes and alternations of party through the civil wars, the faithful Rochelloise clung to the tenets of the Reformation, to Christ and their open Bibles, with unshaken firmness.

The town had a fine harbor, and was naturally well fortified, while nature had been carefully reinforced by art. The garrison now consisted of fifteen hundred regular troops and about two thousand of the burghers, who belonged to the train-bands of the city. These had been well disciplined in the frequent wars, and their ardor was at this time raised to fever heat by the enthusiasm of the women, who at once emulated and animated their husbands, fathers, and lovers.

The influence of the preachers was also very marked. Two among them, La Place and Denard, were remarkable for their ability, energy, and devotion. Their discourses marvelously strengthened the determination of the populace, whose humanity was appealed to by descriptions of the sufferings endured by their brothers in the faith; but they chiefly dwelt upon the paramount claims of religion to their utmost devotion. Denard was very eloquent; and he possessed such influence by his persuasive style, that he was called the pope of Rochelle.

Although the town was not completely invested before the close of January, 1573, there were several assaults in December, 1572; one especially was upon a mill near the counter-scarp. As it could not easily be fortified, it served as a barbican or post of observation in the daytime, and at night it was left under guard of a single sentinel. Strozzy, considering that the position would be valuable to the Rochelloise, advanced by moonlight to attack it. The solitary sentinel, with a hardihood rarely equalled, resolved to defend the mill, although two culverines were pointed against it. He briskly fired on the assailants; and in order to deceive them, he called out to an imaginary troop of followers, as if encouraging them or giving orders, while an officer hallooed from the nearest bastion that he would soon be reinforced. The contest was too unequal to allow time for the arrival of the promised assistance, and to avoid the consequences of an assault, the sentinel demanded quarter for himself and men. It was granted; when lo, he walked out alone. Strozzy was so enraged at his presumption in pretending to hold out, that he ordered his heroic prisoner to be hung for his insolence; but Biron interfered, and saved his life, at the same time condemning him to the galleys. Happily the courageous fellow managed to escape. His name has not been preserved, but Barbet says that he was a brazier of the isle of Rhé.

The conduct of the court in the prosecution of the war was enigmatical. La Noué, a fearless soldier, a skilful captain, and a zealous Huguenot, had been absent in Hainault, whither he had been sent by Coligny to collect such intelligence as might be useful in that Netherland campaign which was never to occur, at the time of the "Paris matins;" thus he had escaped the massacre. On his return to France, Charles received him with open arms. He gave La Noué the confiscated estate of his brother-in-law Teligny, and then entreated him to use his influence with the Rochelloise, whose commander he had been in the preceding war, to induce them to accept terms of peace.

At first La Noué peremptorily refused; but after a long struggle he yielded to the importunities of the king, and influenced both by anxiety for peace and the hope of serving his party, he accepted the delicate commission. an adjacent village, and sent to the town announcing his errand and arrival.

The Rochelloise at once dispatched deputies to meet the distinguished soldier. Familiar with the character of the court, they feared that some treachery lurked beneath La Noué's overtures. "We have been invited," said they, "to confer with La Noué; but where is he? It is nothing that the gentleman to whom we speak resembles him in person, when in character he differs so widely from him." The soldier pointed proudly to his artificial arm, which had procured for him the sobriquet of Bras de fer, thus mutely to remind them of the limb which he had lost in their service. But the deputies persisted that they remembered with gratitude their valued friend, but that they did not now recognize him.

Finding it impossible to treat with them, La Noué asked permission to enter Rochelle. The citizens received him joyfully, but would not listen to his proposals for peace. They left him to choose one of three alternatives, a safe passage to England, a residence in their city as a private individual, or the governorship of Rochelle. After some hesitation, lie accepted the command.

Strange to say, this step did not destroy the good opinion which Charles and the whole court party entertained of him; and it is a case almost unparalleled that, being commissioned by two contending parties, he preserved the confidence of both. In action, none more bravely joined in repelling the assailants; and at quiet intervals he never omitted to exhort the townspeople to listen to the king's offers—liberty of conscience, and full security for themselves. But the gallant Rochelloise were not satisfied with simple liberty to worship God for themselves: while their coreligionists went with shackled lips, they knew no peace. They insisted on treating for all the Huguenots, a demand to which the king would not accede.

After a time La Noué, dissatisfied with his equivocal position, requested and obtained permission to quit Rochelle for an honorable retirement.

The Rochelloise could not but regret the loss of their skilful chieftain, but they "bated no jot of heart or hope." The siege dragged through six bloody months, and still the Huguenot bastions remained impregnable. There was no order among the royalists, no unit, no combination of plans; jealousy and bickering poisoned their counsels; 

"And enterprises of great pith and moment, 
With this regard, their currents turned awry, 
And lost the name of action." 

Anjou was wounded; Aumale was killed in the trenches; many others of rank also perished; an epidemic broke out in the camp, and fifty thousand men died either by the sword or by disease.

Anjou began to weary of a siege in which his reputation was frittered away; and as the negotiations for the crown of Poland wore an auspicious aspect, the elated prince forgot his duty to France, and passed his time with his favorites in planning schemes of pleasure and magnificence on his installation at Warsaw.

The royal arms were as unsuccessful in other sections as before Rochelle; and in July, 1573, the exhausted state of the court exchequer compelled the cessation of hostilities.

On the 6th of July a treaty of peace was signed, which guaranteed to the confederated cities, Rochelle, Montauban, and Nîmes, the free exercise of their religion and their civic independence. Thus the self-sacrificing efforts of the gallant Rochelloise to secure the enfranchisement, not only of themselves, but of their brothers in Christ, were crowned, though God's favor, with success.

In November, 1573, the duke of Anjou quitted France for his new kingdom of Poland, for that crown had at length been tendered him. His departure was followed by the birth of a new conspiracy, which originated with the duke of Alencon, the Montmorenci's, Biron, and Cossé, to which Navarre and Condé, both of whom had finally succumbed to the king's threats, and apparently united with the Roman church, also adhered. But a variety of circumstances united to strangle this infant cabal in its cradle; and though its aim had been to effect certain needed reforms in the state, without any consideration for religion, it exploded in a laugh.

Charles IX, meanwhile, was every day drawing nearer to his grave. His last hours were embittered by that remorse which agonizes the conscience of the dying sinner. From the fatal eve of St. Bartholomew, he was observed to be always gloomy and wretched; he would groan involuntarily when the horrors which he had perpetrated were recalled. The king's physician, Ambrose Paré, though an outspoken Huguenot, possessed a greater share of his confidence than any other person; and to him he frequently unbossomed the tortures of his soul. "Ambrose," said Charles, "I know not what has happened to me these two or three past days; but I feel my mind and body to be terribly at enmity with each other. Sleeping or waking, the murdered Huguenots seen: ever present to my eyes, with ghastly faces and weltering in their blood. I wish the innocent and the guiltless had been spared."

It is pleasing to record these expressions of repentance, says an eminent historian, for they show that humanity can never be wholly despoiled of her rights, and that outraged conscience will sting the most callous soul.

Henry of Navarre was present at the death of Charles IX. The expiring monarch called him to his side, and recommended his wife and infant daughter to his protection. At this solemn hour he appreciated this manly prince whom he bad so bitterly outraged. He drew Henry to his pillow, and cautioned him to distrust __________; but he whispered the name so faintly, that none heard it but his kinsman into whose ear it went. Catharine, however, who stood near by, guessed his meaning, for she said, "My son, you should not speak thus." "Why not?" queried the king, "it is perfectly true." 

On the 30th of May, 1574, Charles IX expired, bathed in a bloody sweat, which oozed from every pore. Standing beside this awful death-bed; the solemn words of the apostle may be discerned written across the livid lineaments of the atrocious king: "THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH." 

Upon the death of Charles IX, Catherine de' Medici, grown old and hag-like, but as energetic and unscrupulous as in her prime, dispatched a courier to Poland to inform Anjou that the vacant throne of France awaited him; she then assumed the regency during the interregnum.

In these troubled times, the slightest change at court was the signal for a cabal; so important an event as the demise of a monarch was certain to precipitate a revolution. France soon heaved in insurrection, and even private gentlemen made forays upon the royal strong-holds in the southern provinces.

This outbreak had no special religious significance, but was rather one of those periodical upheavals which occur at stated intervals in countries where justice and law are recklessly overridden by selfish, licentious, and abandoned despots. France through all this dismal epoch was emancipated from judicial forms; a strong hand and an unsheathed sword—these were the synonyms of government. The arbiter of all disputes, public or private, was the dagger, the bullet, or the poisoner's bowl. To such a desperate strait had the Italian morality of Catherine de' Medici—the morality which looks upon all means as lawful by which power is obtained and preserved, which stands muttering the favorite Jesuitical shibboleth of the Vatican, "The end sanctifies the means"—reduced unhappy France. Catherine's ancestor, Cosmo de' Medici, had maintained his authority at Florence by severity, guile, and vengeance; should she scruple to use the weapons of so consummate a politician?

She now used all three. Her severity and vengeance were shown by the execution of La Malle and Coconnas; by the arrest of Montgomery in Normandy, shortly followed by his beheadal, ostensibly for killing Henry II in the tournament of 1559, but really because he was one of the most indefatigable and uncompromising of the Huguenots; by the imprisonment of marshals Montmorenci and Cossé in the Bastile, and by the confinement of Alencon and Henry of Navarre in a grated chamber of the Louvre under careful surveillance.

Her guile was exhibited by the attempts which she made to wheedle those chiefs who wisely absented themselves from her dangerous vicinage, and especially by her efforts to cajole D'Amville Montmorenci, who, dissatisfied by the imprisonment of his brother the marshal, by the insult offered his family in the assassination of Coligny, and by the exile of his house from court, aided, sub rosa, the insurgents ill his government of Languedoc, while professing to quell the émuete.

Such was the political situation when Henry III returned to France.

Henry received intelligence of his brother's death within fourteen days after his arrival in Poland. The austere behavior of his new subjects made him regret, even in that brief period, the unchecked profligacy of Paris; and his companions, young libertines from twenty to twenty-five years of age, disgusted by the restraints of decency and virtue, longed to lap themselves once more in the licentious arms of Catharine's court beauties. In this desire the dandy king, who wore earrings, and perfumed his person so that he smelled like a walking Cologne-bottle, fully shared. Fearing lest the Poles might remonstrate against his departure, one dark tempestuous night he quitted his palace at Cracow by stealth, thus abandoning as a fugitive a crown which he had gained by bribery and intrigue, and in two days he reached the frontiers of the German empire.

A little later Henry joined Catharine at Lyons. On arriving at his capital, he found the seeds of civil war again sown; and amid the hireling shouts of gratulation which hailed his presence, he heard the ill-suppressed murmurs of seditious discontent.

But discord was Catharine's element; she reveled in it: "I prefer to fish in troubled waters," said she. She told Henry that it became the hero of Jarnac and Moncontour to crush sedition sword in hand; and the weak monarch succumbed to this subtle flattery, and adopted Catharine's pernicious counsel. Siege was at once laid to one of the insurgent towns—Livron.

At this juncture died the cardinal of Lorraine, whose infamous policy and vaulting ambition had bathed France in blood. He possessed great talents, which he devoted to the aggrandizement of his family, careless of the honor or advantage of his country. He was the center of a circle, and his relatives bounded its circumference; no thoughts of national utility ever, even transiently, entered into his conceptions of state policy. He made use of religion as the ladder of his ambition; he embroiled the various members of the royal family with each other, while he directed their concentrated fury against the best subjects in the kingdom. He was a priest without piety, a statesman without honor, a libertine by practice, a hypocrite by habit, avaricious, unfeeling, treacherous; concealing, under an engaging air of simulated candor, a black heart, malignant and revengeful.

Ere the court recovered from the sensation produced by the cardinal's death, the chiefs of the insurrection met at Millaud and bound themselves by oath to two distinct articles: the political malcontents covenanted never to lay down arms until the Huguenots were secured in the complete and free exercise of their religion; the Huguenots pledged themselves neither to sign a peace, nor to consent to a truce, till the liberation of the captive marshals Montmorenci and Cossé.

Meantime the feeble garrison of Livron defied the utmost exertions of the royal army, and Henry himself went to the camp, accompanied by the queen mother and the court, expecting that his presence would insure the speedy fall of the stubborn town. He was mistaken; when the besieged learned of his arrival before their walls, they crowded to the ramparts and hurled the bitterest insults into his ears. "Cowards," they cried, "assassins, what are you come for? Do you think to surprise us in our beds, and to murder us, as you did the admiral? Show yourselves, minions. Come, prove to your cost that you are unable to stand even against our women.'' Thus Henry was literally hooted from the walls of Livron; he lost his heroic laurels, and raising the siege in a great passion, retired ignominiously to Paris.

The court had scarcely settled itself in the Louvre; ere it was startled by the news that Alencon, the king's brother and heir apparent to the throne, had escaped his mother's surveillance and joined the insurgents. Alencon, whose only importance consisted in his position, for he was utterly destitute of talent and honesty, had been angered by the king's refusal to bestow upon him the lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom, which Henry withheld because he knew his brother's turbulent incompetence.

Still, Alencon was a prince of the blood, and his accession to the opposition gave them increased strength. The confederates had nominated Condé, who had quitted Paris some time before, and was now in Germany recruiting an army for the Huguenots, as their leader, in the absence of Navarre, still held at court; but with rare good sense, when Condé heard that Alencon had joined his party, he conferred the nominal leadership upon that prince, satisfied with retaining its essence.

Soon the confederates had a large army in the field; Condé was rapidly advancing at the head of his German mercenaries; and Thoré Montmorenci, who commanded the advance guard of the main body, met the dukes of Guise and Mayence, brothers, and two of the ablest captains of the age, at the village of Dormans. The forces at once joined battle, and after a sanguinary contest, Thoré was routed. It was here that Guise obtained the wound in the face which gained for him the surname of Le Balafré.

Alencon was soon surrounded by a number of distinguished gentlemen, among whom were Turenne and La Noué. Ere long the party was still further reinforced by the arrival of Henry of Navarre, who escaped from Paris by a stratagem, to the chagrin of Catherine and the rage of Henry III. At Tours, Navarre renounced popery, protested against his abjuration of Calvinism, in 1572, as wrung from him in duress, and announced his determination to battle for his faith.

The Huguenots were jubilant, and they speedily put fifty thousand men-at-arms in the field.

Suddenly Alencon, true to his weak and perfidious nature, wavered, then went over to the court. Soured by the superior influence of Navarre and Condé in the confederate camp, he fell an easy victim to his mother's wiles.

Shortly after Alencon's defection, both parties wearied of the war, and a treaty of pacification was signed. The Huguenots again wrung from the reluctant court those concessions so often granted and so invariably infringed. But the terms now won were more favorable than any heretofore obtained: amnesty for the past; full liberty of conscience; the free exercise of religion, without exceptions of time or place; the power of erecting schools and colleges, of convening synods, of performing marriage, administering the sacraments according to the reformed creed; the eligibility of Huguenots to office; the liberation of all prisoners of state; a promise to establish a court of justice in each parliament, composed jointly and equally of Huguenots and Romanists: these were among the chief clauses of the treaty, a treaty which was characterized at the time as "not a pacification, but a surrender at discretion of the court."

Yet despite Brantome's epigram, the Huguenots committed a gross blunder in signing the pacification. With their experience of the hollowness and treachery of Catherine and the king, it seems strange that they should not have known that concessions so ample would never be executed. Catherine's well-known maxim was, "Divide and govern." When the wily queen was hard pressed, she negotiated a peace, and then went deliberately to work to break its most solemn ratifications.

Concerning this treaty, Davila openly confesses that the court never intended to fulfill their engagements; that all they aimed at was the withdrawal of Alencon from the coalition, and the return of the mercenaries to Germany. And Sully, referring to the queen mother, says, "She offered more than we thought that we could demand; promises cost that artful princess nothing. Thus all things fell out as she wished; for in making this peace she had nothing in view but the disunion of her enemies."

Sully and Davila were right: the treaty of pacification was scarcely ratified before it was pronounced null and void; not one of its articles was ever executed. It produced an armistice, rather than a peace; both parties rested upon their arms. But the apparent "surrender of the court at discretion" was in fact another trophy won by the vicious statesmanship of Catharine de' Medici.  

The rose-water sprinkled upon the glowing embers of the late civil strife was so far from quenching the fire, that the flame threatened at every moment to blaze again with increased fury.

All parties were dissatisfied: the Huguenots, because they saw that they had bartered success for a worthless parcel of parchment promises, which the government had no intention of enforcing; the Romanists, because they thought that their creed had been compromised by even the empty assent to tolerant concessions, whether made in good faith or from hypocrisy; the people at large, because their taxes were vastly increased, while the court spent their substance in riot and debauchery.

But two years had elapsed since Henry's accession, yet he was clothed in dishonor. The Polish diet had expelled him from their throne with the most degrading marks of infamy; and he now lounged in the court of France, occupied in seductions, in inventing new forms of etiquette, and in weighty consultations with his tailor upon the cut of a coat or the tie of a cravat, while his government was crumpling into dust. He was hated by the reformers on account of his vices and his breaches of faith; he was despised by the Romanists for his foppish imbecility. Thus the substance of royalty had departed from him, only the shadow remained. Openly bearded by the Huguenots, while the reactionists, led by the house of Guise, secretly conspired against his nominal authority, this miserable representative of the august Valois dynasty saw none but enemies abroad and rebels at home. His only friends, if that sacred name can be applied to such characters, were young libertines, the companions of his profligacies, whose extravagance and license put the seal to his unpopularity.

Not the slightest dependence was placed upon the unsteady royal popinjay. On behalf of his party, Condé wrote to prince Cassimir requesting him to remain near the frontier with his lanzknechts, as great apprehension was felt that the pacification would not be observed by the court.

On their part, the ultramontanists, incited by the gold of the Spanish king, and filled with the venom of religious hate, longed and watched and plotted for the dismal tocsin to ring in once more the "Paris matins." They petitioned the king to revoke the recent edict; they conjured him to exterminate the heretics.

Henry's will to comply with this congenial requisition was as good as that of the fiercest fanatic in his kingdom; nothing would have pleased him better than to figure as the hero of another St. Bartholomew. But he lacked stamina; when weighty obstacles were to be surmounted, his unstable and weak nature succumbed. Wary and dissembling as he was, he made use of an expression which showed the wish of his heart, immediately after signing the obnoxious treaty. The Huguenots of Rouen had just resumed the exercise of their worship, and the cardinal of Bourbon, accompanied by several counsellors, went to their rendezvous to prevent the service. He entered without difficulty, but when he mounted the pulpit and began to speak, the evangelicals quitted the building and left him to address empty benches. Some one told the king that the cardinal had dispersed the Huguenots of Rouen by a flourish of his cross and banner. "Is 't so?" cried Henry; "would to God they could be as easily driven from the other towns, were it even necessary to add the holy-water basin."

But the ultramontanists distrusted Henry's pluck, and they despised his lack of vigor. Therefore they determined to choose a fitter leader, and to league themselves together by an oath to extirpate heresy, and to exclude the Huguenots from participation in the government.

Such, in its inception, was the famous League; such was its abhorrent and fanatic object. Later, as we shall see, it assumed an additional phase.

There is a little cabinet in the castle of Joinville which has long been pointed out as the chamber in which the league was formed. There, in 1576, there were assembled Tassis and Moreo, two delegates of the king of Spain, the dukes of Guise and Mayenne, who also represented the cardinal of Guise and the dukes D'Aumale and Elboeuf; and besides these, a delegate of the cardinal of Bourbon. A covenant was drawn up and signed, Henry duke of Guise was appointed chief of the association, and under the pretext of religion, a terrible, secret, and atrocious society was launched which, like the Jesuits who reinforced it, plotted in the dark, used all weapons of deceit and fraud and force, and ere long drenched Europe in blood.

As in antiquity Athens cannot be thought of without Sparta, Rome without Carthage, so in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries France can neither be comprehended nor understood without the counterpart of the Spanish monarchy.

What was it that Francis I and Charles V contended for in their time? The emperor sought to realize that universal supremacy which was connected in theory with his title; Francis maintained the idea of France. There was now no danger to be apprehended from the Capuchin emperor; but his son and successor, powerful in the possession of extensive territories and the gold of the Indies, renewed the claim to Spanish predominance, and stepped forth himself as the champion of the ancient faith against its assailants. In the adherents of the Vatican he met with warm supporters, by whose assent he assumed the position and authority of head of the reactionists generally throughout Europe.

The League then was largely his idea, and Guise became merely the lieutenant of Philip II when he assumed the nominal leadership.

The emissaries of the new society circulated the forms of the covenant with equal celerity and secrecy: at first no proselytes were made; only papists of known zeal and discretion signed the rolls and took the oath, for the association did not mean to strike a hasty blow; they intended rather to perfect their organization at leisure, and to await an auspicious moment for the manifestation of their prodigious power.

Thus the League lay coiled and torpid, like a huge serpent, ready to spring upon the victim when events should warm it into vicious life.

Meantime, towards the close of the year 1576, the states-general were convened at Blois. France was agitated; Henry had just learned by accident of the formation of the League; the Huguenots were clamorous for the enforcement of the edict of pacification; the papists were mutinous; chaos seemed come again. The king was alarmed. The League boldly demanded war; he felt himself too weak to resent their insolence; yet to yield was in effect an abdication. In an unhappy moment Henry determined himself to head the League, to become the chief of a faction, instead of the sovereign of a nation.

This maneuver disconcerted the confederates; but instantly recovering their equanimity, they dispatched the duke of Guise to visit the king, and enjoin him as a member of the holy union to annul the last edict and proclaim war. It was however desirable that, before the sword was unsheathed, Navarre, Condé, and D'Amville should be summoned to obey the king, in order that on their refusal to recant, the responsibility of the ensuing strife might appear to rest on their heads.

This was done. Navarre declared that "If God opened his eyes that he might see his error, not only would he immediately abjure it, but he would contribute his utmost efforts to abolish heresy altogether," a speech which has been well said to be characteristic of the epoch. Navarre was at the time in arms for liberty of conscience, and yet declared his readiness to become a persecutor if a change took place in his opinions, a remark which actually justified the leaguers in their course, and which cried Amen to the tortuous diplomacy of Catharine de' Medici.

The deputies to Condé and D'Amville received this answer: "We ask only for peace; let the promises given us be fulfilled, and all will be well; besides, we do not acknowledge your states-general, and we protest against every resolution there made to our prejudice."

Towards the close of March, 1577, the war recommenced; the campaign, however, was a tedious one; little was accomplished on either side; it was a war of skirmishes. The League, persuaded that their policy dictated patient preparation, and convinced that they were not yet fit to take the field, dissembled; and Henry, true to his weak nature, speedily tired of the contest when no longer hounded on by bolder rogues. The consequence was the conclusion of a new treaty at Bergerac, in September, 1577, which was immediately followed by the edict of Poictiers, confirming, in all essential respects, the tolerant enactments of the past.

Peace—if a society torn by feuds and cursed by incessant émuetes, can be said ever to enjoy that blessing—now reigned through three years.

In 1580, a wanton insult offered by king Henry to the queen of Navarre, by a brother to a sister, again kindled war. Henry, impelled by his love of mischief or by his dislike of Navarre, wrote that prince that Turenne was criminally intimate with Margaret.

Both Turenne and the queen were naturally indignant at this insult, with which Navarre acquainted them by showing the royal letter, and they spared no pains to precipitate another revolution.

This contest had no religious basis; yet such was the peculiarity of the times, that in any trouble the chiefs of either party could depend upon the support of their partisans, who took it for granted that the object for which they battled was just.

After raging fiercely for some months, the "Lover's war," as it was called on account of its origin, was concluded by another pacification, and weary France again rested for a moment from internecine butchery.

But the kingdom had undergone so many and such violent convulsions, had become so habituated to martial strife, that a parchment treaty had no power to tranquilize it. The civil wars had created a distaste for the ordinary occupations of life; a large portion of the population, demoralized by the camp, hated whatever made for peace; the country swarmed with banditti; bravos, ready to assassinate or to plunder, awaited employment in the open market-place. Such was France under the imbecile scepter of Henry III; but while the papists, in the excess of their fanatic zeal, did not scruple to charge these crying evils to the prevalence of heresy, the Huguenots, with better philosophy, attributed them to the wickedness of France, abandoned to licentious despots and the whims of fanaticism; no text was more frequent upon their lips than this: "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people."  

In June, 1584, the duke of Alencon died at Chateau-Thierry, a castle on his apanage, and his demise opened a vast field to those intriguers who were fomenting civil war.

Instantly the torpid League sprang to its feet, full of Satanic energy, and prepared for action. In the reigning monarch the house of Valois became extinct. Henry had been married ten years, but he was childless; by the death of Alencon, Navarre of the line of Bourbon became next heir to the throne. This the Salic law decreed; this abstract right not the fiercest bigot questioned. But the Navarrese prince was a Huguenot; and the champions of the Vatican in France appealed through the League to the intolerant passions of the people, affirming that the accession of a Calvinist monarch would necessitate the overthrow of Latin orthodoxy.

The chiefs of the League were again convened at Guise's castle of Joinville, and to this rendezvous Philip of Spain also sent his delegates. A pronunciamento was agreed on, and shortly published. Proceeding from the fundamental principle that a heretic could not be king of France, this paper declared the League to be of one mind, that the scepter should not pass to the king of Navarre, but to his uncle the cardinal of Bourbon, a younger brother of that renegade Antony, who married Jane d’Albrét, and from whom these claims were derived. The cardinal, by his plenipotentiary, joined the union and adopted the shibboleth. Further, the League was announced to be intended to effect the extirpation of the Huguenots not only in France, but also in the Netherlands. The king of Spain promised for the first year a subsidy of one million scudi. The Freud princes, on their part, regarding themselves as already clothed in the royal purple, bound themselves to renounce the alliance with the Ottoman Porte; to give up the system of piracy carried on in the West Indian waters; to restore Cambray, wrung from Philip by the valor of the Protestants; and to assist Spain in the subjugation of the Netherlands.

Such, in its main features, was the extraordinary treaty concluded between the traitorous subjects of Henry III and the Spanish government, without the consent, nay, without the knowledge of the king of France.

When Henry learned of the mischief which was brewing, he was prodigiously startled. One of his favorites, Epernon, was hastily dispatched to Henry of Navarre, to offer him the undisputed succession, provided he would return to the court, renounce his creed, and reconcile himself to Rome.

The League, in its turn, was now startled. Matthieu, a Jesuit, who was nicknamed the courier of the League, was sent to Rome to procure the pontiff's dispensation for the action of the confederation, a move which looked to the murder of the king. But Gregory XIII steadily refused to sign any document, while his verbal answers were always expressed with non-committal craft.

In the mean time Epernon lad been received by Henry of Navarre with courtesy. The Navarrese prince hesitated. By renouncing Calvinism he smoothed his path to the throne, but he distrusted the sincerity of the court: he feared to exchange his present independence for a gorgeous imprisonment; nay, more, should the Guises regain the ascendency, his assassination was certain. He was also much influenced by the recent conduct of his wife, who was separated from him, and who led a licentious life in Auvergne. He felt that he would be obliged to receive her back to secure the sincere friendship of the queen mother and the king, if any such quality as sincerity could be expected from Henry III, whose other name was duplicity, and from Catherine, whose synonym was treachery.

These considerations made him finally resolve neither to embrace Romanism nor to return to the court; but he offered to assist the king against the League, and declared himself open to conviction in religion.

Jest as Henry III received this answer, and stood deeply lamenting the failure of the negotiation, the leaguers, who had assembled at Gaillon, in the neighborhood of Rouen, published a manifesto declaring war without awaiting the king's assent, artfully blending together the interests of religion, the privileges of the nobles, and the oppressions of the poor, demanding the definitive revocation of all tolerant edicts, and dictating the expulsion of the Huguenots from France.

The emissaries of the League then seized every strong-hold which they could surprise; while Guise, at the head of an insignificant army, rendezvoused at Chalons, and anxiously awaited reinforcement.

The king published a counter-declaration, in which he appeared rather to justify his imbecile government than to condemn the rebellion. "Forgetting the arms which nature and necessity presented to him, he had recourse to pen and paper," says a satirical contemporary; "but so tamely that you would say he did not dare to name his enemy, and that he resembled a man who complains without saying who has beaten him."

The king's appeal produced no effect; not a sword was drawn.

Had Henry possessed either courage or energy, he might have easily dispersed Guise's nucleus force. Indeed Guise himself said to Nangis, when that gentleman asked him what he should do if the king assailed him, "Retire as quickly as possible to Germany, and await a more favorable opportunity."

But when fear chills the heart and paralyzes the arm of a sovereign, all is lost; the audacity of revolt increases with impunity. Could Henry have exhibited the conqueror of Jarnac, he would have insured tranquility. But anxious to appease the insurgents, not to quell them, he entreated the queen mother to meet Guise, assure him of his friendship, and accede to the terms of the League, rather than disturb the peace of France.

Lyons, Bourges, Orleans, Angers, had succumbed to his feeble army, and Guise, emboldened by success, met Catharine with an air of bravado, and with rare insolence actually dictated a peace to his king. A request, signed by himself and the cardinal of Bourbon, was presented, demanding an edict for the extirpation of heresy, the forcible expulsion of the Huguenots from the kingdom, a pledge from Henry to adhere to the League, and to renounce the protection of Geneva.

This "request" was at once adopted, and the royal imbecile signed the ignominious treaty at Nemours on the 7th of July, 1585. From this hour Henry III ceased to be de facto king of France; he was merely the nominal chief of a religious faction. He himself felt this, and he once said with a touch of pathos, " 'Tis true that I wear the crown, but Guise is the king of hearts." The king now came to hate Guise with the peculiar virulence of a weak and treacherous nature, and he determined to avail himself of the first opportunity to avenge his humbled honor by the stiletto of a bravo. "This over-powerful subject," muttered he, "must be swept from my path."

The Huguenots received the intelligence of this fatal treaty with grief and consternation. The king of Navarre was astounded. Condé's troops had been largely disbanded; the party were unprepared for war; the fiercest harry yet organized, sanctioned by the king, was about to swoop upon them. So terrible was Navarre's agony, says the historian Matthieu, that "his mustachios became white in a night."

But unlike the king, his energy and fertility of resource were not to be paralyzed by danger, either menaced or present. With Titanic zeal he labored to save imperiled Christianity. Negotiations with Protestant powers abroad were opened; the home partisans of reform were summoned to assemble; Condé went into Germany to recruit his lanzknechts: Navarre published an appeal to Christendom, in which he complained of being stigmatized as a relapsed heretic, a persecutor of the church, a disturber of the state, false and malicious libels on his character invented to deprive him of the royal succession; declared that he had been compelled to appear to abjure his faith on the St. Bartholomew to save his life; that he was open to conviction, but that efforts had always been made to destroy rather than convert him: he repudiated the accusation of persecuting the papists, showing that many of that creed held high offices in his hereditary domains, and that others were constantly in attendance upon his person: he averred that he had never molested the persons nor touched the revenues of the Romish priests; offered to place all his fortresses in the king's hands if the Guises and their adherents would imitate his example; denounced the ambition of the house of Lorraine; and concluded by giving the lie to his enemies, and offering to decide the quarrel with the duke of Guise according to the chivalric habit of the times, by combat, either singly, or with two, ten, or twenty on a side.

This manifesto produced a profound sensation. Liberal Europe cried, Amen. His friends displayed increased devotion; the indifferent joined him, partly from admiration for his fortitude, partly because they were clear-sighted enough to perceive that he was the victim of a base and unprincipled faction, who, to compass their ambitions views, would hazard laying France prostrate at the feet of Spain.

Small detachments of cavaliers reached Navarre from time to time, the precursors of more formidable levies; and this prince, who was supposed by many to be preparing for flight, was soon strong enough to attack the overconfident League.

Thus Navarre was supported by his own indomitable heroism, by the enthusiasm of his party, by the prayers of the righteous, and by God's all-powerful hand.

The contest at once commenced. It was called, The War of the Three Henry’s—Henry III at the head of the royalists, Henry of Guise at the head of the leaguers, and Henry of Navarre at the head of the Huguenots.

At this critical juncture pope Gregory XIII died. He had steadily refused to identify himself with the League, or to put the Bourbon princes out of the pale of the church: "I will leave the door open for their conversion," said he. He was succeeded by Felici Paretti, a fanatical friar of the Franciscan order, who assumed the tiara under the title of Sextus V. This pontiff had no scruples; he excommunicated Navarre and Condé, stigmatizing them as relapsed heretics; as such he declared them incapable of the royal succession; he deprived them of their estates, absolved their subjects and vassals from allegiance, and menaced with anathema all who should thenceforth serve them either in a civil or military capacity.

Unawed by this brutum fulmen, the Bourbon princes preserved their serenity, and even posted on the walls of the Vatican a protest against the anathema.

But this authoritative voice from the "holy of holies" at Rome consolidated the League, confirmed many doubting consciences, and gave Guise prestige. Even Catharine was awed into the cessation of her machinations. Croaking, "Divide and govern," she had ventured to negotiate with Navarre, and to give him covert aid; for she feared lest Guise might be too successful, and thereby destroy the political balance. Guise discovered this move, and shaking his finger menacingly, bade the withered old diplomat beware of approaching the abyss of excommunication; and the queen mother shrank back affrighted.

The League was jubilant; the sanction of the pontiff was the test of every Jesuit sermon. The fanatics declared that victory was sure to follow a banner blessed by the vicegerent of God; and the zealots already in imagination celebrated the extirpation of heresy.

Still, on the whole, the moral effect of this insolent interference was favorable to the Huguenots. The calmer and more reflecting members of the body politic deprecated the pope's presumption. They perceived that it struck at the civil franchises of the kingdom, and might be twisted into a precedent dangerous to the privileges of tile Gallican church.

The pontiff's fiat did indeed detach numerous partisans from the Huguenot banner, but these were of the lowest and most ignorant class. As a compensation, many gentlemen of rank openly adhered to Navarre; while others who did not choose publicly to join him, stood neutral, or favored him in secret. The gauntlet he had flung down to Guise and which the chief of the League had not ventured to take up, his defiance of the pope, the severe misfortunes which he had incurred, all combined to make Navarre an object of interest, of admiration, of pity; they gained him the active sympathy of the good, the generous, and the heroic.

The Swiss cantons sent deputies to Henry to intercede for the Huguenots. The Germans, animated by the eloquence of the famous Theodore Beza, who had pleaded the cause of the Reformation before Charles II in happier years, armed in defense of their coreligionists, and enthusiasm gave to their movements the character of a Protestant crusade.

Henry of Navarre took the field: under such a leader, small bodies equaled armies. He marched from victory to victory. Fired by his spirit, his troops captured fortresses, subjugated provinces, and baffled the most subtle tactics of Mayenne.

On the 20th of October, l587, the battle of Coutras was fought. The royalists, commanded by the duke of Joyeuse, were confident, well equipped, and ten thousand strong.

The Huguenot army was composed of four thousand infantry and two thousand five hundred cavalry; but the disparity of numbers was balanced by discipline. Joyeuse was a courtier; Navarre was a soldier. The duke's officers were dressed in richly ornamented costume, and their helmets were adorned by brilliant plumes; the Huguenots displayed naught but iron, and arms rusty with rain. It was the army of Darius against that of Alexander.

Navarre drew up his men-at-arms in the form of a crescent; Condé and the count of Poisson were on his right, Turenne was upon his left. "My friends," cried the king, "behold a prey much more considerable than any of your former booties; this is a bridegroom who has still the nuptial present in. his pocket, and all the chief courtiers with him." Then turning to Condé and Soisson, he said, "All that I shall observe to you is, that you are of the house of Bourbon, and, please God, I will show you that I am your elder brother."

Just as Navarre concluded, one of his principal supporters, Duplessis-Mornay, stepped forward, and in a solemn manner reminded Henry of the great injury which he had done the reformed religion by his incontinence, and particularly by the recent and notorious seduction of a young lady of Rochelle. "Sire," said this reproving Nathan, "make public reparation for your misconduct, lest God send defeat as a judgment upon your so many sins."

Henry, influenced either by religious feeling, or considering that the ardor of his soldiers would be heightened by the freedom of their cause from so foul a stigma, consented publicly to avow his fault in the church of Pau, and also to confess it on his first visit to Rochelle. He then knelt, together with the whole army, while prayer was offered to the God of battle.

This spectacle, instead of awakening respect in Joyeuse's mind, only conformed his vain confidence. "See," cried he, with a chuckle, "they kneel, they tremble; the day is ours." Laverdin, an old soldier, who was familiar with the habits of the Huguenots, replied, "Nay, my lord, you mistake. 'Tis their custom; they always pray when they mean either to conquer or die."

The battle was decided in half an hour. The courtiers were no match for the soldiers of Christ. The royalists routed; five thousand dead; five hundred prisoners; Joyeuse slain: such were the fruits of this brilliant victory.

The Bourbon princes performed prodigies of valor on that day, but Navarre eclipsed them all. He fought like the paladin of a fairy tale. A white plume fastened in his helmet made him conspicuous. When some of his friends, esteeming him menaced, threw themselves in front of him to shield his person, he cried, "Give me room, I beseech you; you stifle me: I would be seen."

Henry did not press his victory; indeed he is charged with having frittered it away. Quitting the army, which he left under the charge of Turenne, he repaired to Bearn and laid at the feet of the duchess de Guiche, of whom he was enamoured, the colors captured at Coutras. He dwarfed the heroic Henry of the battle-plain to the dandy carpet-knight of a courtesan's boudoir—a sad metamorphosis, shameful to the prince, and insulting to his God.

To say nothing of his duty as a professed Christian, he ought not, as an able captain, to have bartered success for a lady's smile; he ought not to have muddled the future by leaving it to the chapter of accidents, when, by energetic action, he might lave anchored God's cause and his country's.  

Tedious negotiations, which had no effect, followed the battle of Coutras. In the meanwhile Guise was winning laurels at the head waters of the Loire. His name was on every papist's lips. Henry III, jealous of this renown, himself departed for the army; but he arrived only in time to see the hated Guise entwine the laurel about his brow; so that when the king returned to Paris, armed cap-à-pie, with the port of a warrior, the witty citizens only lampooned his vanity and satirized his assumption of stolen honors.

But Guise was the popular idol. The metropolis especially resounded with pans in his praise. The "new David," the "second "Moses," the "modern Gideon," "the prop and pillar of holy church," such were the titles showered upon him. Every café in Paris hymned his virtues.

This adulation turned Guise's head. Hurried away by the madness of ambition, he summoned his family to assemble at Nancy; and here the house of Lorraine matured a scheme for deposing the king, immuring him in a cloister, and crowning Henry of Guise.

This shows how little interest the princes of Lorraine really took in religion; they only used it as a vehicle in which to ride to empire. Their simple, sole object in every maneuver, from the very inception of these troubles in the reign of Francis I, through forty rears of internecine strife, was the aggrandizement of their mushroom house. To that every thing was made to bend—the public weal, religious honor, the good faith of the state; the weightiest interests were transmuted into battle-doors.

The convocation at Nancy masked its real design, the usurpation of the throne by Guise; and committing to writing a series of insolent demands, forwarded them to the king. This precious document was not a petition; it was a command. Signed by the Guises, the cardinal of Bourbon, and other principal chiefs of the League, it imperiously demanded that the king should banish from his court all persons who were from any cause obnoxious to the "holy union;" that he should publish and enforce the decrees of the Council of Trent, place in the hands of the confederates such towns and fortresses as they might see fit, the crown paying the garrisons and all costs of fortification, and confiscate the Huguenot estates to defray the expenses of the war of extermination.

Henry III was quite broken by this daring insolence. As was usual with him when perplexed, he applied to the queen mother for assistance. Discord reigned in the privy council. One set of the king's minions favored the League; another urged the monarch to identify himself with Navarre, and strangle that presumptuous union, the pest of France. In accordance with the weak vacillation of his character, he took neither counsel, but contenting himself with half measures, which in stormy crises always disgust both parties, he sent the conspirators at Nancy word that lie would consider their petition.

Guise, emboldened by the king's timidity, now resolved to strike a decisive blow. His friends were ready; he was sure of the capital; the omens were auspicious; he determined to proceed to Paris, and seize Henry during the celebration of the carnival.

Despite the written and reiterated orders of his sovereign not to quit the camp, he entered Paris on the 9th of May, 1588, at high noon. Ere he had passed half through the city, he was recognized and thronged by the admiring mob. Thirty thousand people formed his retinue. "The shouts of the people," says an eye-witness, "sounded to the skies; nor did they ever cry, "VIVE LE ROY" as energetically as they now shouted, "VIVE GUISE." Some saluted him, some gave him thanks, some bowed to him, others kissed the hem of his garment. Those who could not get near him manifested their joy by gestures; some were seen who, adoring him as a saint, and touching him with their beads, either kissed them or pressed them against their eyes and foreheads. Even the women, thronging green leaves and blooming flowers from their windows, honored and blessed his coming.

Guise, with a smiling countenance and gracious air, showed himself affable to some in words, to some by courteously returning their salutations; others he requited with kind looks. Passing through the throng with his hat off, he omitted nothing that was calculated to win and rivet the affection and applause of the people.

Such was the reception awarded to the "king of Paris." Guise, intoxicated by this adulation, had the hardihood to visit the Louvre. Catherine was aghast. She received him pale, trembling, and dismayed. Henry's consternation may not be described. The impudent duke stood with easy nonchalance, enjoying the astonishment which his presence caused, and smiling as the shouts of the populace, who now crowded the court of the Louvre and the adjacent streets, came borne to his ears on the exultant wind.

Henry reproached Guise for his disobedience in visiting the capital, and the stern look which greeted him at length made the champion of the League and the idol of the Parisians turn pale. After a stormy interview, the duke feigned fatigue, and took his leave amid the acclamations of the multitude.

In the evening Guise fortified his house and stored it with ammunition. Equal vigilance was observed at the Louvre. The Swiss were under arms, and every man-at-arms whom Henry could press into service was put on guard.

The nest morning Guise again visited the Louvre; but fearful of treachery, he was accompanied by four hundred armed friends. Nothing was accomplished; and in the evening further consultations were held.

In the meantime every wile was employed to lash the excitable populace into a frenzy. The report was spread that a hundred and twenty of the chief leaguers were marked out for death. A counterfeit list was framed and circulated. Guise headed the victims. The people, incited by the priests, raged madly. Then commenced the famous barricades.

Paris, in the reign of Henry III, was not protected by the vigilant police of modern times. Now the constabulary force receives instructions from the crown minister; then it was wholly under the control of the municipal authorities. The city was then girt with walls, flanked by lofty towers; the gates were shut exactly at the fixed hour, and the sheriffs held the keys. The burgesses were formed into a militia, chose their own officers, and were frequently drilled. At the corners of the streets weighty chains were attached to rivets in the houses; these were stretched out at the least alarm, and thus all communication of one quarter of the city with another was impeded.

The people had banners, fixed places of meeting, rallying words; and no more than a drum-tap or the sound of a bell was required to collect a mass of soldiers under arms, imperfectly disciplined, but formidable from their number. Paris was divided into sixteen districts: in each of these a council was formed in the interest of the League; these appointed sixteen demagogue delegates, who made another council, called the "Council of Sixteen," which was so famous in the religious wars of France.

Now the SIXTEEN were in their element. The tocsin sounded; the streets were unpaved; the chains extended from corner to corner; the Swiss guard of the king, shut up in the square before the church of the INNOCENTS and isolated, were soon forced to surrender; and Guise saw himself master of Paris by an almost bloodless coup d'état.

While these scenes were being enacted in the streets of his turbulent and traitorous capital, Henry, palsied by fear, gave up all hope. He had been informed of the object of Guise's visit by one of the repentant conspirators, and he could not believe that his foe would let slip this opportunity: he stood disarmed and friendless; what could save him?

The craft of Catharine de' Medici extricated her inefficient son from Guise's net.

The queen mother had already visited Guise, when he had named such hard terms as amounted to the abdication of the king. Now, returning to the duke, she held him in protracted conversation, that he might have no opportunity to invest the Louvre, while the king prepared for instant flight.

Proceeding into the garden of the Tuilleries on pretense of taking a promenade, Henry repaired to the royal stables, equipped himself for his journey, and immediately set off on horseback, accompanied by a suite of fifteen or twenty gentlemen, for Chartres, where he arrived safely the next day, receiving every mark of affection and respect.

In the meanwhile Memville, one of Guise's attendants, having ascertained that Henry had quitted Paris, burst unceremoniously into the duke's cabinet, interrupted the queen mother's empty harangue, which meant only time, and flung into his master's ears the announcement, "The king has fled from Paris." The duke started up in dismay, and said to Catharine, "Ah, madame, I am undone; while your majesty has been detaining me, the king has departed to plot my ruin." Catharine, versed in all the arts of dissimulation, replied, "I credit not this news," and took her leave.

Although bitterly disappointed that the grand prize had escaped him, Guise was not inactive, but took every precaution to secure the advantages which he had gained. He secured the Bastile, took St. Cloud, Vincennes, Lagry, and thus commanded the free navigation of the Seine and the Marne to the gates of Paris, and revolutionized the municipal administration, filling all offices with his satellites.

Notwithstanding these usurpations, Henry, from his retreat at Chartres, had the despicable weakness to open negotiations with the triumphant Parisian leaguers; and eventually a treaty was signed, which ratified demands very similar to those drawn up at Nancy.

In this edict a clause was inserted which guaranteed the convocation of the states-general at Blois on the 16th of October, 1588, to confirm the treaty. Victors thus far, the princes of Lorraine now used every effort to subsidize the members of the states-general; religious zeal, ambition, avarice, all were appealed to; they were again successful, and Guise was master of the assembly ere its opening session was held.

At the appointed time, the states-general were convened, and the pomp was unprecedented. The King, who, despite his reconciliation with the League, had resolutely refused to enter Paris since his ignominious flight, sojourning meantime at Rouen, made the inaugural address. Then business commenced; maneuver succeeded maneuver. Guise was confirmed as commander of the gend'armerie; a prior decree, declaring the cardinal of Bourbon first prince of the blood and next heir to the throne, was assented to; and Guise, blinded by success, moved that the decrees of the Council of Trent be registered, an act which world have barred the house of Bourbon from the crown. Even the lackey states paused here. They were not prepared to go to such a length. The clergy feared to jeopard the rights of the Gallican church; the nobles dreaded any extension of the papal power over their temporalities; the states secured a practical veto by postponement.

Guise, no whit discouraged, then moved that Navarre be declared incapable of the succession; this was voted with alacrity. In spite of Henry's intrigues, notwithstanding his manifest reluctance to accede to this fiat, against the protest of Navarre, who denounced the states-general as a packed and exclusive convention of his enemies, the king, finding that he could neither conquer the inflexible resolution of the League nor evade their demands, finally assented to the general rote, and said that he would issue an edict giving it validity.

The political situation was still farther confused by the seizure of the marquisate of Saluzzo by the dupe of Vassy, an adherent of the League. This aggression torched the national pride, and the voice of patriotism was heard amid the din of religious discord. Henry charged that Guise had instigated the act; the duke asserted that the king himself incited it. Murmurs arose, and both Guisards and royalists bated each other with increased venom.

It was now, while affairs were thus tangled, while nothing was settled, save that the Huguenots were outlawed, declared incapable of holding office, and tabooed, that Henry, driven to desperation, definitively decided to assassinate his subtle and triumphant persecutor.

He had recourse to Marshal D'Aumont, a brave soldier, and to Nicolas D'Augenay, an able publicist: informing them of his purpose, he asked their opinion. "Strike," advised the cavalier in a monosyllable; but the lawyer, with the instinct of his profession, counseled the duke's imprisonment and trial before the regular tribunals for high treason.

The soldier's advice was the most congenial, and the king resolved to adopt it. It was some time ere he obtained a willing instrument of revenge. At length Loignac, a partisan of Epernon, and a bitter foe of Guise, undertook the work.

On the 22d of December, 1585, Henry sent word to Guise that, as he proposed going to Notre Dame de Clery to pass the festival of Christmas, he should hold his daily council early the next morning.

Loiguac then received his last instructions. Thirteen assassins were introduced into the council-chamber and hidden behind a tapestry: and Henry himself gave each of them a poniard, saying, "Guise is the greatest criminal in my kingdom; the laws, both human and divine, permit me to punish him. Not being able to do so by the ordinary tribunals, I authorize you by my royal prerogative to do so."

In the meantime the wretched victim received Henry's treacherous note, and unmindful of the manifold warnings which he had received to beware of the king, he at once repaired to the palace, where he arrived in the grey, bleak winter dawn. Once in the trap, every thing conspired to alarm the duke. The gates were clanged after him with ominous precaution; he passed though a long lane of soldiers stretching away to the court-yard; he met the archbishop of Lyons, a confidential friend, who said to him in presence of Larchant, one of the captains of the guard, alluding to the light dress he wore, "That coat is too light for this season and place. You should have put on one stiff with fur." These words, pronounced in accents of suspicion, heightened Guise's alarm.

In one of the anterooms he nearly fainted; recovering, he proceeded to the fatal council-chamber. The door had been walled up. Ignorant of this, Guise was in the act of raising the tapestry which screened the apartment, when the bravos sprang upon him, and ere he could draw his sword, gave him countless stabs, and flung him to the floor quite dead.

The false door of the council-chamber was then thrown down, and Henry, followed by his suite, emerged into the anteroom where lay his late redoubted foe. The courtiers jested; and the king himself, in imitation of Guise's brutality to the dead body of Coligny, kicked the duke's remains.

Having gloated his eyes with this ghastly spectacle, Henry hastened to the queen mother, and cried exultingly, "Madame, the king of Paris is dead; I am now king of France."

"I fear," replied the astute Catharine, "that you will soon be king of nothing." But she exhorted him to wait at once upon the papal nuncio, and avert his displeasure, and to use diligence and resolution.

The murder of Guise caused a profound sensation. Never was man less fit to die. He had quitted the chamber of one of the titled harlots of the court, the marchioness of Noirmontier, with whom he had passed the night, on the very morning of his death. He was stained by vices and crimes whose name was legion, and was one of the chief butchers of St. Bartholomew—a fearful record with which to face his God.

Guise possessed many of the qualities of a political leader. He was sagacious, affable, prepossessing in his physique, and possessed the keen, penetrating talent of a Machiavelli. He united in his single person the diplomatic acumen of his equally unscrupulous uncle the cardinal of Lorraine, and the military genius of his father.

Henry III for once acted with vigor. He ordered the arrest and instant execution of the cardinal of Guise. Then the bodies of the unhappy princes were consumed in quicklime, and buried secretly. Mayence also was upon the red list, but he escaped from Lyons to Dijon, whence he repaired to Paris; but the archbishop of Lyons, the old cardinal of Bourbon, the prince de Joinville, and the duke of Elboeuf were seized. "Hencefurth," cried the aroused king, "I wish my subjects to know that I will be obeyed. I will punish the leaders of insurrection, and those who abet them. I will be king not merely in words, but in deeds; and it will be no difficult matter for me to wield the sword again as I did in my youth."

News of the tragedy at Blois reached Paris on the day succeeding the assassination of the duke of Guise. Popular indignation vented itself in the bitterest and fiercest execrations. Sermons were preached on the martyrdom of the "king of Paris," and Henry was compared to Herod. Intelligence of the death of the cardinal of Guise soon followed, and the outcries of fury grew louder and deeper. The king was denounced as a favorer of heresy, as an enemy to holy church, who had dyed his hands in the blood of an ecclesiastic. Priest and layman panted for revenge. Councils of war were held in shops and cloisters. The statues of the king were broken, the royal arms were defaced; he was called simply, Henry of Valois. The Sorbonne declared that he had forfeited the crown, and that his subjects not only might, but ought to cast off their allegiance; and this resolution was forwarded to Rome for the sanction of the pope.

In the midst of this excitement, Catharine de' Medici died. She breathed her last on the 5th of January, 1589, in the seventieth year of her active and intriguing life.

Catharine possessed a strong intellect, persuasive eloquence, and an invention so ready that it never halted for an expedient. She believed with the Vatican, that "the end justifies the means;" and in the pursuit of her purpose, she availed herself without a scruple of the most abhorrent arts, and especially of the licentiousness of her court. She was always accompanied by a bevy of fair but frail beauties; and by her encouragement of vice, she raised it to an unparalleled height of dissoluteness and infamy.

In the exercise of her cruelty and perfidy, she eventually became equally detested by the papists and the Huguenots, both of whom she had often betrayed. Fighting with such poisoned weapons, she could not fail to be despised in each camp when she became known in each.

In her stony heart maternal affection had no sway. She encouraged her children in habits of licentiousness, in order to make them subservient to her will. She is even accused of murdering two of her sons when they stood in her path; and it is not questioned that she employed the poisoner's bowl and the stiletto of the bravo to abridge the lives of several rivals. The good she did France was imperceptible; the evil she inflicted, the curses she entailed, the atrocious régime of deceit and perfidy and selfish despotism which she inaugurated, two centuries later crazed France—drove it to blow its own brains out in the revolution of 1793.

The death of the queen mother completed the king's embarrassment. He had leaned upon her counsel; now that prop was gone. The whole country heaved in insurrection. City was opposed to city, castle to castle. In vain did Henry strive to appease the indignation of the League by proving the treason of the duke of Guise. The correspondence with Spain and Savoy, the terms of the alliance, the monies raised to arm the traitors against the throne, all went for nothing. The country was in no mood to listen to evidence; the people were the slaves of unbridled passion; they wanted not truth, but vengeance.

Nor was the monarch more successful in his efforts to placate the pope. When Sixtus V learned through the French ambassador of the death of the Guises, and the imprisonment of the cardinal of Bourbon and the archbishop of Lyons, his rage knew no bounds. "Your master," said he, "thinks to deceive me, and treats me as if I were no more than a poor monk; but he shall find that he deceives himself, not me; and that he has to deal with a pontiff who is ready to shed plenty of blood when the interest of his see requires it." "But, holy father," retorted the keen ambassador, "shall not the king my master be at liberty to kill the cardinal of Guise, his mortal enemy, after pope Pius IV has authorized the murder of cardinal Caraffe, who had been one of his friends?" Sixtus was too much enraged to reply to this home-thrust, so he dismissed the minister from his presence.

This rebuff at the Vatican isolated the king. He held a scepter which he could not wield. On one side of the Loire the exasperated League ruled, undisputed; on the other, the king of Navarre governed. Henry stood alone in the center of his kingdom, without money, without friends, without an army.

He attempted to negotiate with the League; but that confederacy, under the able management of Mayenne, who had been appointed head, had regained stability, and the offended brother of the murdered princes haughtily refused all overtures.

In despair, the wretched monarch recalled the dying advice of the queen mother. He turned to Navarre, and besought his forgiveness and assistance; when this was known, the papal legate and the Spanish ambassador quitted him, and proceeding to Paris, recognized the lords of the League as the legitimate government of France.

But the Huguenot sky was propitious. Navarre acceded to Henry's request for an armistice; and on the 30th of April, 1589, clasping hands at Plessisles-Tours, the two monarchs pledged themselves to bury the past, to unite for the future; and they entered Tours amid the acclamations of the soldiers and the inhabitants. Huguenots and royalists fraternized, and vowed to devote their consolidated strength to the subjugation of the League and the inauguration of a tolerant régime.

Deeply chagrined by this unexpected phase of affairs, Mayenne collected his squadrons and dashed towards Tours, hoping to surprise the kings in the midst of the reconciliatory fêtes. He nearly succeeded. Swooping upon Vendôme, he captured it, and then pressed into the suburbs of Tours. After a severe contest, Mayenne was forced back; and retreating across France slowly and sullenly, he passed through St. Cloud into the friendly and sheltering walls of Paris.

The jubilant royalists crossed the Loire close on Mayenne's heels. When they reached Poissy, they were joined by some foreign auxiliaries, ten thousand Swiss and four thousand Germans, whom the king had enlisted under his banner. These, added to the detachments of Longueville, Montpensier, De Givry, and Navarre, swelled Henry's army to forty-two thousand fighting men.

The terror excited by this array reduced those towns which environed the capital to speedy submission. Consternation reigned in Paris. Mayenne could only muster eight thousand infantry and eighteen hundred cavalry. Despite his exertions, all the passages of the Seine were wrung from his control, and the approaches to the bridges fell into the hands of the king.

Paris was almost strangled by the besiegers, so closely did they clasp the throat of the rebellious capital. Henry in person begirt the Faubourg St. Honoré, and all that side of the Louvre which borders on the river. Navarre besieged the line from the Faubourg of St. Martin to that of St. Germain.

The fate of Mayenne seemed certain; when fanaticism extricated the League from the impending danger, and once more unsettled France.

Fanatical opinions exercise their power oftener over individuals than on great corporations. From the midst of the common fermentation there now arose a monk who resolved to perpetrate a fresh deed of horror. This was Jacques Clément, a Dominican whose passions were strong, whose principles were libertine, and whose frenzy was unequalled. He had recently been ordained a priest. To persons of his own age and to his friends, he was an object of ridicule. He was weak in body and simple of mind. Such are the natures on which fanaticism makes the most profound impression. Clément was persuaded that it was lawful to kill a tyrant, and he laid before his superiors the question whether it would be a mortal sin for a priest to assassinate a despot. He was told that it would be an irregularity, but no mortal sin. Meantime every art was employed to heat his brain and nerve his hand for the atrocious deed.

When the fanatic communicated his project to Mayenne and D'Aumale, they approved it. The demagogue Council of Sixteen applauded it. He was promised a cardinal's hat if he did the deed and escaped; if taken and executed, he was assured of canonization; and on the night that his resolution was confirmed, the duchess of Montpensier sacrificed all that a woman holds most dear to the young libertine regicide.

Thus doubly crazed by passion and by fanaticism, Clément provided himself with forged credentials to the king; then bidding his friends adieu, he passed outside the lines of the League, loosened his frock, and walked with rapid strides towards Henry's camp. After some delay, he spent the night within the king's lines. Clément succeeded in securing an audience. Henry approached him. Pretending to draw a paper from his sleeve, he drew instead a knife, which he plunged with deadly effect into the monarch's abdomen. "Wretch," cried the king, "what have I done, that you should assassinate me?" and as he spoke, he drew the fatal blade from the wound, and struck it into the forehead of the miscreant friar. La Guesle, one of the attendant courtiers, ran him through. His body was hurled from the window, where it was hacked to pieces by the soldiers, burned, and the ashes thrown into the Seine.

Henry lingered eighteen hours, counseled forbearance, deplored the unhappy state in which he left France, exhorted the nobility to remain united, and declared Navarre to be his legitimate successor. Then turning to the anxious followers who crowded about his couch, he said, "Adieu, my friends; turn your tears into prayers, and pray for me." Shortly after this, in the thirty-eighth year of his age and the fifteenth of his reign, the last of the house of Valois died without a struggle, while repeating the miserere.

Henry's death was finer than his life. Imbecile, vacillating, vicious, even to name his vices would outrage decency. Never did monarch mount the throne under brighter auspices; never had a king more shamefully squandered his time in low debauchery, lost golden opportunities, and frittered away his reputation. His feebleness alienated the League; his treachery disgusted the Huguenots. His religion was hypocrisy, his prudence was craft, his liberality was licentious prodigality, his private life was a continuous round of enervating and roué pleasure. His death was received by the factions and by bigots with exultation, and France at large rashly attributed it to a stroke of divine justice.  

The monk who murdered Henry III because he was not Romanist enough, by his fatal blow enthroned a Huguenot.

When apprized of the assassination, ultramontane France ran mad with ferocious joy. The Dominicans of the capital chanted Te Deum. Portraits of Clément were exposed to the veneration of the populace. The statue of the murderer was placed in the cathedral, with the inscription, "St. James Clément, pray for us." Bonfires blazed; rockets shot up to kiss the heavens. The abandoned duchess of Montpensier, in whose arms the assassin had had his purpose confirmed, traversed the Paris streets with disheveled dress, crying, "Good news, my friends, good news! The tyrant is dead; we shall have no more of Henry Valois." Pope Sixtus V, in full consistory, pronounced a studied panegyric upon Clément, beginning his atrocious harangue with a quotation from the Psalms: "This is the Lord's doing; and it is marvelous in our eyes." Then, with frightful blasphemy, this pastor of the faithful declared the cowardly regicidal act comparable, for heroism, to the actions of Judith and Eleazar, and for usefulness, to the incarnation and resurrection of the Savior.

But while the League was exulting, Navarre, aware that boldness is the mother of opinion, and that from this springs power, from power victory, and thence security, hastened to have himself proclaimed king of France under the title of Henry Quatre; then, leaning with one hand upon the Swiss auxiliaries, and with the other upon the united Huguenot and conservative parties, he calmly turned to Europe and demanded recognition.

This, however, was not readily conceded. Most of the foreign states were hostile to his claim; France itself was divided: the League, dominant in half of the kingdom, cried Veto to the new monarch's accession; many of the royalist cavaliers deserted Henry's standard at this critical moment; and the king, with his army thinned by desertion to half its original size—forty-two thousand men—raised the siege of Paris, divided his squadrons into three divisions, and retired into Normandy.

Nor was the League a unit at this crisis. Dissension, bitter and open, ate out the heart of action. Mayenne himself, chief of the "holy union," backed by the formidable house of Guise, aspired to the throne. Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, opposed his election in favor of Philip II, who also had designs upon the crown; and Sixtus V was urged to espouse the cause of the "most Christian king." But the pope did not enter into the views of Spain with any cordiality. He foresaw not if Philip, who was already too strong for the Vatican, should become arbiter of France and master of the Netherlands, he could reduce the pontiff to the position of mere head chaplain to the court of Madrid. Accordingly Sixtus threw the weight of his influence into the scale against Philip, whom he all the time cozened into imagining that he was assisting. This tortuous policy finally effected the election of the old cardinal of Bourbon, whom the Huguenots still held in duress, and who received the empty honor of the ultramontane allegiance, under the sobriquet of Charles X. In the absence of their nominal king, the Council of Sixteen ruled Paris, and Mayenne controlled the Romanist provinces.

In the mean time Henry Quatre, by dint of his superior military genius, beat down all opposition, and marched from victory to victory. He convened a parliament at Tours, where his authority was acknowledged, and where justice was administered in his name; he overran Normandy; he gained the celebrated battle of Argens, in 1588, and subdued a multitude of rebellious towns.

After exhaustive but abortive diplomatic ruses, succeeded by much military maneuvering, the army of the League, commanded by Mayenne, and the Huguenots, led by Henry IV, met, in March, 1590 on the famous plain of Ivry.

Two writers who were with the king mention that, during a terrific thunderstorm which preceded the battle, two armies were descried in the heavens fighting furiously. "This," says Davila, "discouraged the royal army, who for the most part looked on the heavenly display as a presage of defeat, and coupled it with the unhappy rout at the fight of Dreux, fought on that very spot at the commencement of the civil wars."

At a time when the aurora borealis was but little known, this phantom fight in the clouds could not fail of producing consternation.

The force of the two armies was very unequal: the king had eight thousand infantry, and but two thousand cavalry. The League mustered twelve thousand men-at-arms and four thousand horsemen.

In the king's camp much time was given by both Romanists and Protestants to devotion. The churches of the neighboring hamlet of Nanancourt were crowded by gentlemen who went to mass; while the Huguenot ministers performed divine service with their adherents.

When all was prepared, Henry advanced to the head of his army, in complete armor, but bareheaded, and prayed aloud to the Almighty for his favor and protection. When he finished his supplication, a shout of "Vive le roy" ran through his lines. Henry then exhorted his followers to keep their ranks, and assured them that he was determined to conquer or die with them. "Gentlemen," cried he, with animated voice and sparkling eye, "if the standard fail you, keep my plume in your eyes; you will always find it in the path of honor and duty." So saying, he put on his helmet adorned with three white plumes; then perceiving that the wind blew in the faces of his soldiers, and that in consequence the smoke would blind them, he ordered a position to be taken more to the left. Mayenne, perceiving