ad
taken up arms, robbed churches and monasteries, and committed other
sacrilegious acts at Orleans, Lyons, Rouen, and various other cities
mentioned by name, to be rebels, and deprived them of all their offices.
Yet, by way of retaliation upon Conde for maintaining that he had entered
upon the war in order to defend the persons of the king and his mother,
unjustly deprived of their liberty, parliament pretended to regard the
prince himself as an unwilling captive in the hands of the confederates;
and, consequently, excepted him alone from the general attainder.[154] But
the legal fiction does not seem to have been attended with the great
success its projectors anticipated.[155] The people could scarcely credit
the statement that the war was waged by the Guises simply for the
liberation of their mortal enemy, Conde, especially when Conde himself
indignantly repelled the attempt to separate him from the associates with
whom he had entered into common engagements, not to add that the
reputation of the Lorraine family, whose mouthpiece parliament might well
be supposed to be, was not over good for strict adherence to truth.

Meanwhile the triumvirs were more successful in their military operations
than the partisans of the prince. Their auxiliaries came in more promptly,
for the step which Conde now saw himself forced to take, in consequence of
his opponents' course, they had long since resolved upon. They had
received reinforcements from Germany, both of infantry and cavalry, under
command of the Rhinegrave Philip of Salm and the Count of Rockendorf;
while Conde had succeeded in detaching but few of the Lutheran troopers by
a manifesto in which he endeavored to explain the true nature of the
struggle. Soldiers from the Roman Catholic cantons had been allowed a free
passage through the Spanish Franche-Comte by the regent of the Low
Countries, Margaret of Parma. The Pope himself contributed liberally to
the supply of money for paying the troops.[156] But the Protestant
reinforcements from the Palatinate and Zweibruecken (Deux-Ponts), and from
Hesse, which D'Andelot, and, after him, Gaspard de Schomberg, had gone to
hasten, were not yet ready; while Elizabeth still hesitated to listen to
the solicitations of Briquemault and Robert Stuart, the Scotchman, who had
been successively sent to her court.[157]

[Sidenote: Military successes of the triumvirs.]

[Sidenote: Fall of Bourges.]

After effecting the important capture of