------------------+--+------------+
| | |
| | |
Francis, Duke of Guise Charles, Cardinal Mary==James V
d. 1563 of Lorraine | of Scotland
| |
| Mary, Queen
| of Scots
|
+-----------------------+--------------------+
| | |
Henry, Duke of Guise Charles, Duke of Louis, Cardinal of
d. 1588 Mayenne Guise, d. 1588

[Transcriber's note: "d." has been used here as a substitute
for the "dagger" symbol (Unicode U+2020) that signifies the
person's year of death.]

{210}

SECTION 3. THE WARS OF RELIGION. 1559-1598

[Sidenote: Francis II, 1559-60]

Henry II was followed by three of his sons in succession, each of them,
in different degrees and ways, a weakling. The first of them was
Francis II, a delicate lad of fifteen, who suffered from adenoids.
Child as he was he had already been married for more than a year to
Mary Stuart, a daughter of James V of Scotland and a niece of Francis
of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine. As she was the one passion of
the morose and feeble king, who, being legally of age was able to
choose his own ministers, the government of the realm fell into the
strong hands of "the false brood of Lorraine." Fearing and hating
these men above all others the Huguenots turned to the Bourbons for
protection, but the king of Navarre was too weak a character to afford
them much help. Finding in the press their best weapon the Protestants
produced a flood of pamphlets attacking the Cardinal of Lorraine as
"the tiger of France."

A more definite plan to rid the country of the hated tyranny was that
known as the Conspiracy of Amboise. Godfrey de Barry, Sieur de la
Renaudie, pledged several hundred Protestants to go in a body to
present a petition to the king at Blois. How much further their
intentions went is not known, and perhaps was not definitely formulated
by themselves. The Venetian ambassador spoke in a contemporary
dispatch of a plot to kill the cardinal and also the king if he would
not assent to their counsels, and said that the conspirators relied, to
justify this course, on the {211}