The Huguenots were now able to make a stand in the open country, partly from additions to their numbers and partly from the mistakes and frivolities of Henry III., who alienated stern Catholics and his best friends.  It was then that Bouillon, father of the illustrious Turenne, joined the standard of Henry of Navarre.  Soon after this, Henry became heir-apparent of the French throne, by the death of the Duke of Alencon, 1584.  Only the King, Henry III., a man without children, and the last of the male line of the house of Valois, stood between Henry of Navarre and the throne.  The possibility that he, a Protestant, might wield the sceptre of Saint Louis, his ancestor, increased the bitterness and animosity of the Catholics.  All the forces which the Government could raise were now arrayed against him and his party.  The Pope, Sixtus V., in a papal bull, took away his hereditary rights; but fortune favored him.  The Duke of Guise, who aspired to the throne, was himself assassinated, as his father had been; and now, by the orders of his jealous sovereign, his brother, the Cardinal of Guise, nephew of the Cardinal of Lorraine,—­a man who held three archbishoprics, six bishoprics, and five abbeys, and these the richest in the kingdom,—­shared the same fate.  And Providence removed also, soon after, the most guilty and wicked of all the perpetrators of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, even Catherine de Medicis,—­who would be regarded as a female monster, an incarnate fiend, a Messalina, or a Fredegunda, had she not been beautiful, with pleasing and gracious manners, a great fondness for society and music and poetry and art,—­the most accomplished woman of her day, and so attractive as to be compared by the poets of her court to Aurora and Venus.  Her life only shows how much heartlessness, cruelty, malignity, envy, and selfishness may be concealed by the mask of beauty and agreeable manners and artistic accomplishments.

The bloody battle of Coutras enabled Henry of Navarre to take a stand against the Catholics; but after the death of Henry III. by assassination, in 1589, his struggles for the next five years were more to secure his hereditary rights as King of France than to lead the Huguenots to victory as a religious body.  It might have been better for them had Henry remained the head of their party rather than become King of France, since he might not have afterwards deserted them.  But there was really no hope of the Huguenots gaining a political ascendency at any time; they composed but a third part of the nation; their only hope was to secure their religious liberties.