But this atrocity had such a demoniacal blackness and perfidy about it that it filled the whole Protestant world with grief and indignation, especially England, and had only the effect of binding together the Huguenots in a solid phalanx of warriors, resolved on making no peace with their perfidious enemies until their religious liberties were guaranteed Though decimated, they were not destroyed; for the provincial governors and rural magistrates generally refused to execute the royal decrees,—­their hearts were moved with pity.  The slaughter was not universal, and Henry himself had escaped, his life being spared on condition of his becoming a Catholic, which as a matter of form he did.

Nevertheless, all Protestant eyes were now directed to him as their leader, since Coligny had perished by daggers, and Conde on the field of battle.  Henry was still a young man, only twenty years of age, but able, intrepid, and wise.  He and his cousin, the younger Conde, were still held as hostages, while the Huguenots again rallied and retired to their strong fortress of La Rochelle.  Their last hopes centred in this fortress, defended by only fifteen thousand men, under the brave La None, while the royal army embraced the flower of the French nobility, commanded by the Dukes of Anjou and Alencon.  But these royal dukes were compelled to raise the siege, 1573, with a loss of forty thousand men.  I regard the successful defence of this fortress, at this crisis, as the most fortunate event in the whole Huguenot contest, since it enabled the Huguenots to make a stand against the whole power of the monarchs.  It did not give them victory, but gave them a place to rally; and it proclaimed the fact that the contest would not end until the Protestants had achieved their liberties or were utterly annihilated.

Soon after this successful and glorious defence of La Rochelle, Charles IX. died, at the age of twenty-four, in awful agonies,—­the victim of remorse and partial insanity, in the hours of which the horrors of St. Bartholomew were ever present to his excited imagination, and when he beheld wild faces of demons and murdered Huguenots rejoicing in his torments, and heard strange voices consigning his name to infamy and his body to those never-ending physical torments in which both Catholics and Protestants equally believed.  His mother however remained cold, inflexible, and unmoved,—­for when a woman falls under the grip of the Devil, then no man can equal her in shamelessness and reckless sin.

Charles IX. was succeeded, in 1574, by his brother the King of Poland, under the name of Henry III., who was equally under the control of his mother Catherine.

Two years afterward the King of Navarre succeeded in making his escape, and joined the Huguenot army at Tours.  He was now twenty-three.  He astonished the whole kingdom by his courage and intrepidity,—­winning the hearts of the soldiers, and uniting them by strict military discipline.  His friend and counsellor was Rosny, afterwards Duke of Sully, to whose wise counsels his future success may be in a great measure traced.  Fortunate is the prince who will listen to frank and disagreeable advice; and that was one of the virtues of Henry,—­a magnanimity which has seldom been equalled by generals.