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 the bodies of
Joyeuse and his brother had been laid out in the very room where the
conqueror's supper, after the battle, was served, but where he refused,