The rout of Mayenne’s principal corps was quickly followed by the disintegration of his entire army.  The Swiss auxiliaries of the League, though compelled to surrender their flags, were, as ancient allies of the crown, admitted to honorable terms of capitulation.  To the French, who fell into the King’s hands, he was equally clement.  Indeed, he spared no efforts to save their lives.  But it was otherwise with the German lansquenets.  Their treachery at Arques, where they had pretended to come over to the royal side only to turn upon those who had believed their protestations and welcomed them to their ranks, was yet fresh in the memory of all.  They received no mercy at the King’s hands.

Gathering his available forces together, and strengthened by the accession of old Marshal Biron, who had been compelled, much against his will, to remain a passive spectator while others fought, Henry pursued the remnants of the army of the League many a mile to Mantes and the banks of the Seine.  If their defeat by a greatly inferior force had been little to the credit of either the generals or the troops of the League, their precipitate flight was still less decorous.  The much-vaunted Flemish lancers distinguished themselves, it was said, by not pausing until they found safety beyond the borders of France; and Mayenne, never renowned for courage, emulated or surpassed them in the eagerness he displayed, on reaching the little town from which the battle took its name, to put as many leagues as possible between himself and his pursuers.  “The enemy thus ran away,” says the Englishman William Lyly, who was an eye-witness of the battle; “Mayenne to Ivry, where the Walloons and reiters followed so fast that there standing, hasting to draw breath, and not able to speak, he was constrained to draw his sword to strike the flyers to make place for his own flight.”

The battle had been a short one.  Between ten and eleven o’clock the first attack was made; in less than an hour the army of the League was routed.  It had been a glorious action for the King and his old Huguenots, and not less for the loyal Roman Catholics who clung to him.  None seemed discontented but old Marshal Biron, who, when he met the King coming out of the fray with battered armor and blunted sword, could not help contrasting the opportunity his Majesty had enjoyed to distinguish himself with his own enforced inactivity, and exclaimed, “Sire, this is not right!  You have to-day done what Biron ought to have done, and he has done what the King should have done.”  But even Biron was unable to deny that the success of the royal arms surpassed all expectation, and deserved to rank among the wonders of history.  The preponderance of the enemy in numbers had been great.  There was no question that the impetuous attacks of their cavalry upon the left wing of the King were for a time almost successful.  The official accounts might conveniently be silent upon the point, but the truth could not be disguised that at the moment