had been living among Huguenots, the same hideous work took place for three days, sparing neither age nor sex.  How many thousands died, it is impossible to reckon, but the work was so wholesale that none were left except those in the southern cities, where the Huguenots had been too strong to be attacked, and in those castles where the seigneur was of “the religion.”  The Catholic party thought the destruction complete, the court went in state to return thanks for deliverance from a supposed plot, while Coligny’s body was hung on a gibbet.  The Pope ordered public thanksgivings, while Queen Elizabeth put on mourning, and the Emperor Maximilian II., alone among Catholic princes, showed any horror or indignation.  But the heart of the unhappy young king was broken by the guilt he had incurred.  Charles IX. sank into a decline, and died in 1574, finding no comfort save in the surgeon and nurse he had saved.

8.  The League.—­His brother, Henry III., who had been elected King of Poland, threw up that crown in favour of that of France.  He was of a vain, false, weak character, superstitiously devout, and at the same time ferocious, so as to alienate every one.  All were ashamed of a man who dressed in the extreme of foppery, with a rosary of death’s heads at his girdle, and passed from wild dissipation to abject penance.  He was called “the Paris Church-warden and the Queen’s Hairdresser,” for he passed from her toilette to the decoration of the walls of churches with illuminations cut out of old service-books.  Sometimes he went about surrounded with little dogs, sometimes flogged himself walking barefoot in a procession, and his mignons, or favourites, were the scandal of the country by their pride, license, and savage deeds.  The war broke out again, and his only remaining brother, Francis, Duke of Alencon, an equally hateful and contemptible being, fled from court to the Huguenot army, hoping to force his brother into buying his submission; but when the King of Navarre had followed him and begun the struggle in earnest, he accepted the duchy of Anjou, and returned to his allegiance.  Francis was invited by the insurgent Dutch to become their chief, and spent some time in Holland, but returned, unsuccessful and dying.  As the king was childless, the next male heir was Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre, who had fled from court soon after Alencon returned to the Huguenot faith, and was reigning in his two counties of Bearn and Foix, the head of the Huguenots.  In the resolve never to permit a heretic to wear the French crown, Guise and his party formed a Catholic league, to force Henry III. to choose another successor.  Paris was devoted to Guise, and the king, finding himself almost a prisoner there, left the city, but was again mastered by the duke at Blois, and could so ill brook his arrogance, as to have recourse to assassination.  He caused him to be slain at the palace at Blois in 1588.  The fury of the League was so great that Henry III. was driven to take refuge with the King of Navarre, and they were together besieging Paris, when Henry III. was in his turn murdered by a monk, named Clement, in 1589.