ginally procured for him
the favour by which he so largely profited in the sequel was a voyage to
Spain, voluntarily undertaken under unusual difficulties. The courier
who was conveying to Philip the despatches of the Duc de Mayenne and the
other chiefs of the League, having been taken by the emissaries of Henri
IV, and the despatches opened by his ministers, it was decided that
copies should be made, and the originals resealed and forwarded to their
destination by some confidential person who might bring back the
replies, in order that a more perfect judgment might be formed by the
Council of their probable result. For such an undertaking as this,
however, it was obvious that a messenger must be found at once faithful,
expert, and courageous; and such an one offered himself in the person of
La Varenne, who without a moment's hesitation offered his services to
the King, and acquitted himself so dexterously of his self-imposed task
that he succeeded, not only in procuring two interviews with the Spanish
Council, but even an audience of Philip, without once exciting
suspicion; and his arrival at Madrid had been so well timed that
although a second courier was despatched in all haste by the League, to
announce the capture of his predecessor, he was enabled to effect his
return to France with the reply of the Spanish monarch, by which Henry
and his ministers were apprised of the plans and pretensions of that
potentate (Amelot de la Houssaye, _Lettres du Cardinal d'Ossat_, vol.
ii. p. 17 _note_.) La Varenne was subsequently Master-General of the
Post Office.

[280] Philippe de Mornay, Seigneur de Plessis-Marly, Governor of Saumur,
was born in the year 1549, at Bussy, in the department of the Oise, of a
Catholic father and a Protestant mother (Francoise du Bec), the latter
of whom educated him in the reformed faith. Having escaped the massacre
of St. Bartholomew, he visited Germany, Italy, and England, and finally
entered the service of Henri IV, while he was still King of Navarre, who
sent him on a mission to Queen Elizabeth. His science, his valour, and
his high sense of honour, rendered him after the abjuration of the
monarch the chief of the Protestant party, and caused him to be called
_the Huguenot Pope_. He sustained against Duperron, Bishop of Evreux,
the famous conference of Fontainebleau, at whose close each of the two
parties claimed the victory. Louis XIII deprived him of his government
of Saumur; and he died in 1