After disbanding his troops at Strasburg, and after making the best arrangements possible under the circumstances for the eventual payment of their wages, he had joined the army which the Duke of Deux Ponts had been raising in Germany to assist the cause of the Huguenots in France.  The Prince having been forced to acknowledge that, for the moment, all open efforts in the Netherlands were likely to be fruitless, instinctively turned his eyes towards the more favorable aspect of the Reformation in France.  It was inevitable that, while he was thus thrown for the time out of his legitimate employment, he should be led to the battles of freedom in a neighbouring land.  The Duke of Deux Ponts, who felt his own military skill hardly adequate to the task which he had assumed, was glad, as it were, to put himself and his army under the orders of Orange.

Meantime the battle of Jamac had been fought; the Prince of Condo, covered with wounds, and exclaiming that it was sweet to die for Christ and country, had fallen from his saddle; the whole Huguenot army had been routed by the royal forces under the nominal command of Anjou, and the body of Conde, tied to the back of a she ass, had been paraded through the streets of Jarnap in derision.

Affairs had already grown almost as black for the cause of freedom in France as in the provinces.  Shortly afterwards William of Orange, with a band of twelve hundred horsemen, joined the banners of Coligny.  His two brothers accompanied him.  Henry, the stripling, had left the university to follow the fortunes of the Prince.  The indomitable Louis, after seven thousand of his army had been slain, had swum naked across the Ems, exclaiming “that his courage, thank God, was as fresh and lively as ever,” and had lost not a moment in renewing his hostile schemes against the Spanish government.  In the meantime he had joined the Huguenots in France.  The battle of Moncontour had succeeded, Count Peter Mansfeld, with five thousand troops sent by Alva, fighting on the side of the royalists, and Louis Nassau on that of the Huguenots, atoning by the steadiness and skill with which he covered the retreat, for his intemperate courage, which had precipitated the action, and perhaps been the main cause of Coligny’s overthrow.  The Prince of Orange, who had been peremptorily called to the Netherlands in the beginning of the autumn, was not present at the battle.  Disguised as a peasant, with but five attendants, and at great peril, he had crossed the enemy’s lines, traversed France, and arrived in Germany before the winter.  Count Louis remained with the Huguenots.  So necessary did he seem to their cause, and so dear had he become to their armies, that during the severe illness of Coligny in the course of the following summer all eyes were turned upon him as the inevitable successor of that great man, the only remaining pillar of freedom in France.