succeeded
John de Bayeux in the metropolitan throne of Rouen; Hugh de Coilly,
grandson of King Stephen, after being elected to preside over this
monastery, was almost immediately transferred to the archbishopric of
York;[40] and Charles de Martigni, abbot of St. Stephen's in the
fifteenth century, was successively honored with two episcopal mitres.
It was by him that the prelacy was first held _in commendam_, an example
too tempting not to be followed; and the abbey, thus constantly gaining
in the dignity of its superiors, as constantly lost in their real value.
Seven cardinals, (among whom were the celebrated Cardinals of Richelieu,
Mazarine and Fleury,) a natural son of King Henry IV. an archbishop of
Lyons, two of Aix, and one of Rouen, were among its most modern abbots.
Another of them, John Le Got,[41] was present at the abjuration of Henry
IV. in the church of St. Denys, on the twenty-fifth of July, 1593; and
by virtue of his office as apostolical prothonotary, subscribed his name
to the letter from the bishops to the Pope, declaring that nothing had
taken place in the transaction, inconsistent with the reverence due to
his holiness. A list of considerable length might also be made from
among the monks of the convent, of those who have been ennobled by their
talents or dignities.

The monastic buildings appertaining to the Abbey of St. Stephen were
begun in 1704, and completed after a period of twenty-two years. They
are now attached to the royal College of Caen, to which establishment
they were appropriated at the revolution; and, provided as they were
with noble gardens, they were an accession of the utmost importance to
the institution. But the value of the gift has, within the ten last
years, been considerably lessened, by the municipality having robbed the
college of the greater part of the gardens, for the purpose of
converting them into an open square. The plan of the buildings was
furnished by a lay-brother of the Benedictine order, named William De la
Tremblaye, who also erected those of the sister Convent of the Trinity,
at Caen; and those of the Abbey of St. Denis. During the storms of the
revolution, the abbatial church happily suffered but little. Fallen,
though it be, from its dignity, and degraded to parochial, it still
stands nearly entire. Not indeed as it came from the hands of the Norman
architect, but as it was left by the Huguenots in the sixteenth century,
when, with the violence which marked