persevering in applying for the assistance of heretic musketeers and
riders from his protestant friends in England, Holland, Germany, and
Switzerland.

Queen Elizabeth and the States-General vied with each other in generosity
to the great champion of protestantism, who was combating the holy league
so valiantly, and rarely has a great historical figure presented itself
to the world so bizarre of aspect, and under such shifting perplexity of
light and shade, as did the Bearnese in the early spring of 1590.

The hope of a considerable portion of the catholic nobility of his realm,
although himself an excommunicated heretic; the mainstay of Calvinism
while secretly bending all his energies to effect his reconciliation with
the pope; the idol of the austere and grimly puritanical, while himself a
model of profligacy; the leader of the earnest and the true, although
false as water himself in every relation in which human beings can stand
to each other; a standardbearer of both great branches of the Christian
Church in an age when religion was the atmosphere of men's daily lives,
yet finding his sincerest admirer, and one of his most faithful allies,
in the Grand Turk,

[A portion of the magnificently protective letter of Sultan Amurath,
in which he complimented Henry on his religious stedfastness, might
almost have made the king's cheek tingle.]

the representative of national liberty and human rights against regal and
sacerdotal absolutism, while himself a remorseless despot by nature and
education, and a believer in no rights of the people save in their
privilege to be ruled by himself; it seems strange at first view that
Henry of Navarre should have been for centuries so heroic and popular an