The Earl was indignant when he heard of the event.  As there had been no written proof of his complicity in the conspiracy, the judges had thought it improper to mention his name in the sentences.  He, of course, denied any knowledge of the plot, and its proof rested therefore only on the assertion of the prisoners themselves, which, however, was circumstantial, voluntary, and generally believed!

France, during the whole of this year of expectation, was ploughed throughout its whole surface by perpetual civil war.  The fatal edict of June, 1585, had drowned the unhappy land in blood.  Foreign armies, called in by the various contending factions, ravaged its-fair territory, butchered its peasantry, and changed its fertile plains to a wilderness.  The unhappy creature who wore the crown of Charlemagne and of Hugh Capet, was but the tool in the hands of the most profligate and designing of his own subjects, and of foreigners.  Slowly and surely the net, spread by the hands of his own mother, of his own prime minister, of the Duke of Guise, all obeying the command and receiving the stipend of Philip, seemed closing over him.  He was without friends, without power to know his friends, if he had them.  In his hatred to the Reformation, he had allowed himself to be made the enemy of the only man who could be his friend, or the friend of France.  Allied with his mortal foe, whose armies were strengthened by contingents from Parma’s forces, and paid for by Spanish gold, he was forced to a mock triumph over the foreign mercenaries who came to save his crown, and to submit to the defeat of the flower of his chivalry, by the only man who could rescue France from ruin, and whom France could look up to with respect.

For, on the 20th October, Henry of Navarre had at last gained a victory.  After twenty-seven years of perpetual defeat, during which they had been growing stronger and stronger, the Protestants had met the picked troops of Henry III., under the Due de Joyeuse, near the burgh of Contras.  His cousins Conde and Soissons each commanded a wing in the army of the Warnese.  “You are both of my family,” said Henry, before the engagement, “and the Lord so help me, but I will show you that I am the eldest born.”  And during that bloody day the white plume was ever tossing where the battle, was fiercest.  “I choose to show myself.  They shall see the Bearnese,” was his reply to those who implored him to have a care for his personal safety.  And at last, when the day was done, the victory gained, and more French nobles lay dead on the field, as Catharine de’ Medici bitterly declared, than had fallen in a battle for twenty years; when two thousand of the King’s best troops had been slain, and when the bodies of Joyeuse and his brother had been laid out in the very room where the conqueror’s supper, after the battle, was served, but where he refused, with a shudder, to eat, he was still as eager as before—­had the wretched Valois been possessed of a spark of manhood, or of intelligence—­to shield him and his kingdom from the common enemy.’