petty war, counted as the sixth, which was closed by the Peace of Bergerac, another ineffectual truce which settled nothing.  It was a peace made with the Politiques and Huguenots by the Court; it is significant of the new state of affairs that the League openly refused to be bound by it, and continued a harassing, objectless warfare.  The Duc d’Anjou (he had taken that title on his brother Henri’s accession to the throne) in 1578 deserted the Court party, towards which his mother had drawn him, and made friends with the Calvinists in the Netherlands.  The southern provinces named him “Defender of their liberties;” they had hopes he might wed Elizabeth of England; they quite mistook their man.  In 1579 “the Gallants’ War” broke out; the Leaguers had it all their own way; but Henri III., not too friendly to them, and urged by his brother Anjou, to whom had been offered sovereignty over the seven united provinces in 1580, offered the insurgents easy terms, and the Treaty of Fleix closed the seventh war.  Anjou in the Netherlands could but show his weakness; nothing went well with him; and at last, having utterly wearied out his friends, he fled, after the failure of his attempt to secure Antwerp, into France.  There he fell ill of consumption and died in 1584.

This changed at once the complexion of the succession question.  Hitherto, though no children seemed likely to be born to him, Henri III. was young and might live long, and his brother was there as his heir.  Now, Henri III. was the last Prince of the Valois, and Henri of Navarre in hereditary succession was heir presumptive to the throne, unless the Salic law were to be set aside.  The fourth son of Saint Louis, Robert, Comte de Clermont, who married Beatrix, heiress of Bourbon, was the founder of the House of Bourbon.  Of this family the two elder branches had died out:  John, who had been a central figure in the War of the Public Weal, in 1488; Peter, husband of Anne of France, in 1503; neither of them leaving heirs male.  Of the younger branch Francois died in 1525, and the famous Constable de Bourbon in 1527.  This left as the only representatives of the family, the Comtes de La Marche; of these the elder had died out in 1438, and the junior alone survived in the Comtes de Vendome.  The head of this branch, Charles, was made Duc de Vendome by Francois I. in 1515; he was father of Antoine, Duc de Vendome, who, by marrying the heroic Jeanne d’Albret, became King of Navarre, and of Louis, who founded the House of Conde; lastly, Antoine was the father of Henri IV.  He was, therefore, a very distant cousin to Henri III; the Houses of Capet, of Alencon, of Orleans, of Angouleme, of Maine, and of Burgundy, as well as the elder Bourbons, had to fall extinct before Henri of Navarre could become heir to the crown.  All this, however, had now happened; and the Huguenots greatly rejoiced in the prospect of a Calvinist King.  The Politique party showed no ill-will towards him; both they and