Thus was the way paved and the beginning made, between the two kings, of an alliance demanded by their mutual interests, and still more strongly by the interests of France, ravaged and desolated, for nearly thirty years past, by religious civil wars.  Henry of Navarre had profound sympathy for his country’s sufferings, an ardent desire to put a stop to them, and at the same time the instinct to see clearly that the day had come when the re-establishment of harmony and common action between himself and Henry de Valois was the necessary and at the same time possible means of attaining that great result.  On the 4th of March, 1589, soon after the states of Blois had been dismissed, he set before France, in an eloquent manifesto, the expression of his anxieties and his counsels:  “I will speak freely,” said he, “to myself first and then to others, that we may be all of us without excuse.  Let us not be puffed up with pride on one side or another.  As for me, although I have received more favors from God in this than in all past wars, and, whilst the two other parties (how sad that they must be so called!) are enfeebled, mine, to all appearance, has been strengthened, nevertheless I well know that, whenever I go beyond my duty, God will no longer bless me; and I shall do so whenever, without reason and in sheer lightness of heart, I attack my king and trouble the repose of his kingdom. . . .  I declare, then, first of all to those who belong to the party of the king my lord, that if they do not counsel him to make use of me, and of the means which God hath given me, for to make war, not on them of Lorraine, not on Paris, Orleans, or Toulouse, but on those who shall hinder the peace and the obedience owed to this crown, they alone will be answerable for the woes which will come upon the king and the kingdom. . . .  And as to those who still adhere to the name and party of the League, I, as a Frenchman, conjure them to put up with their losses as I do with mine, and to sacrifice their quarrels, vengeance, and ambition to the welfare of France, their mother, to the service of their king, to their own repose and ours.  If they do otherwise, I hope that God will not abandon the king, and will put it into his heart to call around him his servants, myself the first, who wish for no other title, and who shall have sufficient might and good right to help him wipe out their memory from the world and their party from France. . . .  I wish these written words to go proclaiming for me throughout the world that I am ready to ask my lord the king for peace, for the repose of his kingdom and for my own. . . .  And finally, if I find one or another so sleepy-headed or so ill-disposed that none is moved thereby, I will call God to my aid, and, true servant of my king, worthy of the honor that belongs to me as premier prince of this realm, though all the world should have conspired for its ruin, I protest, before God and before man, that, at the risk of ten thousand lives, I will essay—­all alone—­to prevent it.”