For, on the 20th October, Henry of Navarre had at last gained a victory.  After twenty-seven years of perpetual defeat, during which they had been growing stronger and stronger, the Protestants had met the picked troops of Henry iii., under the Due de Joyeuse, near the burgh of Contras.  His cousins Conde and Soissons each commanded a wing in the army of the Warnese.  “You are both of my family,” said Henry, before the engagement, “and the Lord so help me, but I will show you that I am the eldest born.”  And during that bloody day the white plume was ever tossing where the battle, was fiercest.  “I choose to show myself.  They shall see the Bearnese,” was his reply to those who implored him to have a care for his personal safety.  And at last, when the day was done, the victory gained, and more French nobles lay dead on the field, as Catharine de’ Medici bitterly declared, than had fallen in a battle for twenty years; when two thousand of the King’s best troops had been slain, and when the bodies of Joyeuse and his brother had been laid out in the very room where the conqueror’s supper, after the battle, was served, but where he refused, with a shudder, to eat, he was still as eager as before—­had the wretched Valois been possessed of a spark of manhood, or of intelligence—­to shield him and his kingdom from the common enemy.’

For it could hardly be doubtful, even to Henry iii., at that moment, that Philip ii. and his jackal, the Duke of Guise, were pursuing him to the death, and that, in his breathless doublings to escape, he had been forced to turn upon his natural protector.  And now Joyeuse was defeated and slain.  “Had it been my brother’s son,” exclaimed Cardinal de Bourbon, weeping and wailing, “how much better it would have been.”  It was not easy to slay the champion of French Protestantism; yet, to one less buoyant, the game, even after the brilliant but fruitless victory of Contras, might have seemed desperate.  Beggared and outcast, with literally scarce a shirt to his back, without money to pay a corporal’s guard, how was he to maintain an army?

But ‘Mucio’ was more successful than Joyeuse had been, and the German and Swiss mercenaries who had come across the border to assist the Bearnese, were adroitly handled by Philip’s great stipendiary.  Henry of Valois, whose troops had just been defeated at Contras, was now compelled to participate in a more fatal series of triumphs.  For alas, the victim had tied himself to the apron-string of “Madam League,” and was paraded by her, in triumph, before the eyes of his own subjects and of the world.  The passage of the Loire by the auxiliaries was resisted; a series of petty victories was gained by Guise, and, at last, after it was obvious that the leaders of the legions had been corrupted with Spanish ducats, Henry allowed them to depart, rather than give the Balafre opportunity for still farther successes.