_Eidgenossen_" or oath comrades. Henry II., like his father, protected
German Lutherans and persecuted French Calvinists; but the lawyers of
the Parliament of Paris interposed, declaring that men ought not to be
burnt for heresy until a council of the Church should have condemned
their opinions, and it was in the midst of this dispute that Henry was
slain.

3. The Conspiracy of Amboise.--The Guise family were strong Catholics;
the Bourbons were the heads of the Huguenot party, chiefly from policy;
but Admiral Coligny and his brother, the Sieur D'Andelot, were sincere
and earnest Reformers. A third party, headed by the old Constable De
Montmorency, was Catholic in faith, but not unwilling to join with the
Huguenots in pulling down the Guises, and asserting the power of the
nobility. A conspiracy for seizing the person of the king and
destroying the Guises at the castle of Amboise was detected in time to
make it fruitless. The two Bourbon princes kept in the background,
though Conde was universally known to have been the true head and mover
in it, and he was actually brought to trial. The discovery only
strengthened the hands of Guise.

4. Regency of Catherine de' Medici.--Even then, however, Francis II.
was dying, and his brother, _Charles IX._, who succeeded him in 1560,
was but ten years old. The regency passed to his mother, the Florentine
Catherine, a wily, cat-like woman, who had always hitherto been kept in
the background, and whose chief desire was to keep things quiet by
playing off one party against the other. She at once released Conde, and
favoured the Bourbons and the Huguenots to keep down the Guises, even
permitting conferences to see whether the French Church could be
reformed so as to satisfy the Calvinists. Proposals were sent by Guise's
brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, to the council then sitting at Trent,
for vernacular services, the marriage of the clergy, and other
alterations which might win back the Reformers. But an attack by the
followers of Guise on a meeting of Calvinists at Vassy, of whose ringing
of bells his mother had complained, led to the first bloodshed and the
outbreak of a civil war.

5. The Religious War.--To trace each stage of the war would be
impossible within these limits. It was a war often lulled for a short
time, and often breaking out again, and in which the actors grew more
and more cruel. The Reformed influence was in the south, the Catholic in
the east. Most of t