m without tears." And he expressed at the same time his paternal fears
lest the young Charles and those who had consented to the unholy compact
would be given over to a reprobate mind, that seeing they might not see,
and hearing they might not hear.[1247]

To his last breath Pius retained the same thirst for the blood of the
heretics of France. He violently opposed the marriage of the king's sister
to Henry of Navarre, and instructed his envoy at the French court to bring
up again that "matter of conciliation so fatal to the Catholics."[1248]
His last letters are as sanguinary as his first. Meanwhile his acts
corresponded with his words, and left the King of France and his mother in
no doubt respecting the value which the pretended vicegerent of God upon
earth, and the future Saint,[1249] set upon the life of a heretic; for,
when the town of Mornas was on one occasion captured by the Roman Catholic
forces, and a number of prisoners were taken, Pius--"such," his admiring
biographer informs us, "was his burning zeal for religion"--ransomed them
from the hands of their captors, that he might have the satisfaction of
ordering their public execution in the pontifical city of Avignon![1250]
And when the same holy father learned that Count Santa Fiore, the
commander of the papal troops sent to Charles's assistance, had accepted
the offer of a ransom for the life of a distinguished Huguenot nobleman,
he wrote to him complaining bitterly that he had disobeyed his orders,
which were that every heretic that fell into his hands should straightway
be put to death.[1251] As, however, Pius wanted not Huguenot treasure, but
Huguenot blood, with more consistency than at first appears, he ordered
the captive nobleman whose head had been spared to be released without
ransom.[1252]

With such continual papal exhortations to bloodshed, before us, with such
suggestive examples of the treatment which heretics ought, according to
the pontiff, to receive, and in the light of the extravagant joy displayed
at Rome over the consummation of the massacre, we can scarcely hesitate to
find the head of the Roman Catholic Church guilty--if not, by a happy
accident, of having known or devised the precise mode of its execution, at
least of having long instigated and paved the way for the commission of
the crime. Without the teachings of Pius the Fifth, the conspiracy of
Catharine and Anjou would have been almost impossible. Without the
preaching of priest