them
that he had arrested the King of Navarre, and that he now surrendered
him to them for safe keeping.

In the morning of the day fixed for his flight, the King of Navarre
held a long and familiar conversation with the Duke of Guise, and
urged him to accompany him to the hunt. Just as the moment arrived for
the execution of the plot, it was betrayed to the king by the
treachery of a confederate. Notwithstanding this betrayal, however,
matters were so thoroughly arranged that Henry, after several
hair-breadth escapes from arrest, accomplished his flight. His
apprehension was so great that for sixty miles he rode as rapidly as
possible, without speaking a word or stopping for one moment except to
mount a fresh horse. He rode over a hundred miles on horseback that
day, and took refuge in Alencon, a fortified city held by the
Protestants. As soon as his escape was known, thousands of his friends
flocked around him.

The Duke of Alencon was not a little troubled at the escape of the
King of Navarre, for he was well aware that the authority he had
acquired among the Protestants would be lost by the presence of one so
much his superior in every respect, and so much more entitled to the
confidence of the Protestants. Thus the two princes remained separate,
but ready, in case of emergence, to unite their forces, which now
amounted to fifty thousand men. Henry of Navarre soon established his
head-quarters on the banks of the Loire, where every day fresh
parties of Protestants were joining his standard.

Henry III., with no energy of character, despised by his subjects, and
without either money or armies, seemed to be now entirely at the mercy
of the confederate princes. Henry of Navarre and the Duke of Alencon
sent an embassador to the French court to propose terms to Henry III.
The King of Navarre required, among other conditions, that France
should unite with him in recovering from Spain that portion of the
territory of Navarre which had been wrested from his ancestors by
Ferdinand and Isabella. While the proposed conditions of peace were
under discussion, Catharine succeeded in bribing her son, the Duke of
Alencon, to abandon the cause of Henry of Navarre. A treaty of peace
was then concluded with the Protestants; and by a royal edict, the
full and free exercise of the Protestant religion was guaranteed in
every part of France except Paris and a circle twelve miles in
diameter around the capital. As a bribe to the Duke o