rized the Puritans, or by
the same strength of religious principle. Moreover, political motives
were mingled with religious. The contest was a struggle for the
ascendency of rival chiefs, as well as for the establishment of
reformed doctrines. The Bourbons hated the Guises, and the Guises
resolved to destroy the Bourbons. In the course of their rivalry and
warfare, the Duke of Guise was assassinated, and the King of Navarre,
as well as the Prince of Conde, were killed.

Charles IX. was fourteen years of age when the young king of
Navarre,--at that time sixteen years of age,--and his cousin, the
Prince of Conde, became the acknowledged heads of the Protestant
party. Their education was learned in the camp and the field of
battle.

Charles IX., under the influence of his hateful mother, finding that
civil war only destroyed the resources of the country, without
weakening the Protestants, made peace, but formed a plan for their
extermination by treachery. In order to cover his designs he gave his
sister, Margaret de Valois, in marriage to the King of Navarre, first
prince of the blood, then nineteen years of age. Admiral Coligny was
invited to Paris, and treated with distinguished courtesy.

[Sidenote: Massacre of St. Bartholomew.]

It was during the festivities which succeeded the marriage of the King
of Navarre that Coligny was murdered, and the signal for the horrid
slaughter of St. Bartholomew was given. At midnight, August 23, 1572,
the great bell at the Hotel de Ville began to toll; torches were
placed in the windows, chains were drawn across the streets, and armed
bodies collected around the hotels. The doors of the houses were
broken open, and neither age, condition, nor sex was spared, of such
as were not distinguished by a white cross in the hat. The massacre at
Paris was followed by one equally brutal in the provinces. Seventy
thousand people were slain in cold blood. The King of Navarre and the
Prince of Conde only escaped in consequence of their relationship with
the king, and by renouncing the Protestant religion.

Most of the European courts expressed their detestation of this
foulest crime in the history of religious bigotry; but the pope went
in grand procession to his cathedral, and ordered a _Te Deum_ to be
sung in commemoration of an event which steeped his cause in infamy to
the end of time.

The Protestants, though nearly exterminated, again rallied, and the
King of Navarre and his cousin the