room. The young King of Navarre and Prince of Condé were threatened into
conforming to the Church, but every other Huguenot who could be found
was massacred, from Coligny, who was slain kneeling in his bedroom by
the followers of Guise, down to the poorest and youngest, and the
streets resounded with the cry, "Kill! kill!" In every city where royal
troops and Guisard partisans had been living among Huguenots, the same
hideous work took place for three days, sparing neither age nor sex. How
many thousands died, it is impossible to reckon, but the work was so
wholesale that none were left except those in the southern cities, where
the Huguenots had been too strong to be attacked, and in those castles
where the seigneur was of "the religion." The Catholic party thought the
destruction complete, the court went in state to return thanks for
deliverance from a supposed plot, while Coligny's body was hung on a
gibbet. The Pope ordered public thanksgivings, while Queen Elizabeth put
on mourning, and the Emperor Maximilian II., alone among Catholic
princes, showed any horror or indignation. But the heart of the unhappy
young king was broken by the guilt he had incurred. Charles IX. sank
into a decline, and died in 1574, finding no comfort save in the surgeon
and nurse he had saved.


8. The League.--His brother, _Henry III._, who had been elected King
of Poland, threw up that crown in favour of that of France. He was of a
vain, false, weak character, superstitiously devout, and at the same
time ferocious, so as to alienate every one. All were ashamed of a man
who dressed in the extreme of foppery, with a rosary of death's heads at
his girdle, and passed from wild dissipation to abject penance. He was
called "the Paris Church-warden and the Queen's Hairdresser," for he
passed from her toilette to the decoration of the walls of churches with
illuminations cut out of old service-books. Sometimes he went about