It appears that Ambrose Pare, at that time the first surgeon of his day, and a faithful Reformer, informed his patron, Admiral Coligny, that there would not be long to wait, and that it was all over with the king.  Up to the very last moment, either by themselves or through their niece Mary Stuart, the Guises preserved their influence over him:  Francis II. sent for the King of Navarre, to assure him that it was quite of his own accord, and not by advice of the Guises, that he had brought Conde to trial.  He died on the 5th of December, 1560, of an effusion on the brain, resulting from a fistula and an abscess in the ear.

[Illustration:  Mary Stuart——­284]

Through a fog of brief or doubtful evidence we can see at the bedside of this dying king his wife Mary Stuart, who gave him to the last her tender ministrations, and Admiral de Coligny, who, when the king had heaved his last sigh, rose up, and, with his air of pious gravity, said aloud before the Cardinal of Lorraine and the others who were present, “Gentlemen, the king is dead.  A lesson to us to live.”  At the same moment the Constable de Montmorency, who had been ordered some time ago to Orleans, but had, according to his practice, travelled but slowly, arrived suddenly at the city gate, threatened to hang the ill-informed keepers of it, who hesitated to let him enter, and hastened to fold in his arms his niece, the Princess of Conde, whom the death of Francis II. restored to hope.

[Illustration:  Coligny at the Death-bed of Francis II.——­295]

CHAPTER XXXIII.——­CHARLES IX.  AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS. (1560-1574.)

We now enter upon the era of the civil wars, massacres, and assassinations caused by religious fanaticism or committed on religious pretexts.  The latter half of the sixteenth century is the time at which the human race saw the opening of that great drama, of which religious liberty is the beginning and the end; and France was then the chief scene of it.  At the close of the fifteenth and at the commencement of the sixteenth centuries, religious questions had profoundly agitated Christian Europe; but towards the middle of the latter century they had obtained in the majority of European states solutions which, however incomplete, might be regarded as definitive.  Germany was divided into Catholic states and Protestant states, which had established between themselves relations of an almost pacific character.  Switzerland was entering upon the same course.  In England, Scotland, the Low Countries, the Scandinavian states, and the free towns their neighbors, the Reformation had prevailed or was clearly tending to prevail.  In Italy, Spain, and Portugal, on the contrary, the Reformation had been stifled, and Catholicism remained victorious.  It was in France that, notwithstanding the inequality of forces, the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism was most obstinately maintained, and appeared for