thirty years that followed. At the time of the Massacre
of St Bartholomew Champlain was five years old. He was
seventeen when William the Silent was assassinated; twenty
when Mary Stuart was executed at Fotheringay; twenty-one
when the Spanish Armada sailed against England and when
the Guises were murdered at Blois by order of Henry III;
twenty-two when Henry III himself fell under the dagger
of Jacques Clement. The bare enumeration of these events
shows that Champlain was nurtured in an age of blood and
iron rather than amid those humanitarian sentiments which
prevail in an age of religious toleration.

Finding his country a camp, or rather two camps, he became
a soldier, and fought for ten years in the wretched strife
to which both Leaguers and Huguenots so often sacrificed
their love of country. With Henry of Valois, Henry of
Navarre, and Henry of Guise as personal foes and political
rivals, it was hard to know where the right line of faith
and loyalty lay; but Champlain was both a Catholic and
a king's man, for whom all things issued well when Henry
of Navarre ceased to be a heretic, giving France peace
and a throne. It is unfortunate that the details of these
adventurous years in Champlain's early manhood should be
lost. Unassisted by wealth or rank, he served so well as
to win recognition from the king himself, but beyond the
names of his commanders (D'Aumont, St Luc, and Brissac)
there is little to show the nature of his exploits.
[Footnote: He served chiefly in Brittany against the
Spanish allies of the League, and reached the rank of
quartermaster.] In any case, these ten years of campaigning