f rested therefore only on the
assertion of the prisoners themselves, which, however, was
circumstantial, voluntary, and generally believed!

France, during the whole of this year of expectation, was ploughed
throughout its whole surface by perpetual civil war. The fatal edict of
June, 1585, had drowned the unhappy land in blood. Foreign armies, called
in by the various contending factions, ravaged its-fair territory,
butchered its peasantry, and changed its fertile plains to a wilderness.
The unhappy creature who wore the crown of Charlemagne and of Hugh Capet,
was but the tool in the hands of the most profligate and designing of his
own subjects, and of foreigners. Slowly and surely the net, spread by the
hands of his own mother, of his own prime minister, of the Duke of Guise,
all obeying the command and receiving the stipend of Philip, seemed
closing over him. He was without friends, without power to know his
friends, if he had them. In his hatred to the Reformation, he had allowed
himself to be made the enemy of the only man who could be his friend, or
the friend of France. Allied with his mortal foe, whose armies were
strengthened by contingents from Parma's forces, and paid for by Spanish
gold, he was forced to a mock triumph over the foreign mercenaries who
came to save his crown, and to submit to the defeat of the flower of his
chivalry, by the only man who could rescue France from ruin, and whom
France could look up to with respect.

For, on the 20th October, Henry of Navarre had at last gained a victory.
After twenty-seven years of perpetual defeat, during which they had been
growing stronger and stronger, the Protestants had met the picked troops
of Henry III., under the Due de Joyeuse, near the burgh of Contras. His
cousins Conde and Soissons each commanded a wing in the army of the
Warnese. "You are both of my family," said Henry, before the engagement,
"and the Lord so help me, but I will show you that I am the eldest born."
And during that bloody day the white plume was ever tossing where the
battle, was fiercest. "I choose to show myself. They shall see the
Bearnese," was his reply to those who implored him to have a care for his
personal safety. And at last, when the day was done, the victory gained,
and more French nobles lay dead on the field, as Catharine de' Medici
bitterly declared, than had fallen in a battle for twenty years; when two
thousand of the King's best troops had been slain, and when t