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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
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