he
tuition of his mother, Protestant influences were thrown around him,
and he was nominally a Protestant. He saved his life at St.
Bartholomew by avowing the Catholic faith. When he escaped from the
Catholic court and returned to his mother's Protestant court in
Navarre, he espoused with new vigor the cause of his Protestant
friends. These changes were of course more or less mortifying, and
they certainly indicated a total want of religious conviction. He now
promised carefully to look at the arguments on both sides of the
question, and to choose deliberately that which should seem to him
right. This arrangement, however, did not suit the more zealous of the
Catholics, and, in great numbers, they abandoned his camp and passed
over to the League.

The news of the death of Henry III. was received with unbounded
exultation in the besieged city. The Duchess of Montpensier threw her
arms around the neck of the messenger who brought her the welcome
tidings, exclaiming,

"Ah! my friend, is it true? Is the monster really dead? What a
gratification! I am only grieved to think that he did not know that it
was I who directed the blow."

She rode out immediately, that she might have the pleasure herself of
communicating the intelligence. She drove through the streets,
shouting from her carriage, "Good news! good news! the tyrant is
dead." The joy of the priests rose to the highest pitch of fanatical
fervor. The assassin was even canonized. The Pope himself condescended
to pronounce a eulogium upon the "_martyr_," and a statue was erected
to his memory, with the inscription, "St. Jaques Clement, pray for
us."

The League now proclaimed as king the old Cardinal of Bourbon, under
the title of Charles X., and nearly all of Catholic Europe rallied
around this pretender to the crown. No one denied the validity of the
title, according to the principles of legitimacy, of Henry IV. His
rights, however, the Catholics deemed forfeited by his Protestant
tendencies. Though Henry immediately issued a decree promising every
surety and support to the Catholic religion as the established
religion of France, still, as he did not also promise to devote all
his energies to the extirpation of the heresy of Protestantism, the
great majority of the Catholics were dissatisfied.

Epernon, one of the most conspicuous of the Catholic leaders, at the
head of many thousand Catholic soldiers, waited upon the king
immediately after the death of Henry II