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 Condé, 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 the provincial cities at first held with the Bourbons,
for the sake of civil and religious freedom; though the Guise family
succeeded to the popularity of the Burgundian dukes in Paris. Still
Catherine persuaded Antony of Bourbon to return to court just as his
wife, Queen Jeanne of Navarre, had become a staunch Calvinist, and while
dreaming of exchanging his claim on Navarre for the kingdom of Sardinia,
he was killed on the Catholic side while besieging Rouen. At the first
outbreak the Huguenots seemed to have by far the greatest influence. An