heartily with the, schemes of Alva and Philip for the extermination of
the Huguenots. His daughter, a woman of beauty, intelligence, and
virtue, forced before the canonical age to take the religious vows, had
been placed in the convent of Joliarrs, of which she had become Abbess.
Always secretly inclined to the Reformed religion, she had fled secretly
from her cloister, in the year of horrors 1572, and had found refuge at
the court of the Elector Palatine, after which step her father refused to
receive her letters, to contribute a farthing to her support, or even to
acknowledge her claims upon him by a single line or message of affection.

Under these circumstances the outcast princess, who had arrived at the
years of maturity, might be considered her own mistress, and she was
neither morally nor legally bound, when her hand was sought in marriage
by the great champion of the Reformation, to ask the consent of a parent
who loathed her religion and denied her existence. The legality of the
divorce from Anne of Saxony had been settled by a full expression of the
ecclesiastical authority which she most respected;

[Acte de, cinq Ministres du St. Evangile par lequel ils declarent le
mariage du Prince d'Orange etre legitime.--Archives, etc., v. 216-
226.]

the facts upon which the divorce had been founded having been proved
beyond peradventure.

Nothing, in truth, could well be more unfortunate in its results than the
famous Saxon marriage, the arrangements for which had occasioned so much
pondering to Philip, and so much diplomatic correspondence on the part of
high personages in Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. Certainly, it
was of but little consequence to what church the unhappy Princess