eager only to return to their homes, clamored
for pay and for plunder. Orange, outgeneralled, was compelled to abandon
the campaign, and would gladly have turned his arms against the oppressors
of his fellow-believers in France; but his German troops had enlisted only
for the campaign in the Netherlands, and peremptorily declined to transfer
the field of battle to another country. However, the depth of the Meuse,
which had become unfordable, furnished more persuasive arguments than
could be brought forward by Genlis and the Huguenots who with him had
joined the Prince of Orange, and the army of the patriots was forced to
direct its course southward and to cross the French frontier.

[Sidenote: Consternation and devices of the court.]

[Sidenote: Declaration of the Prince of Orange.]

Great was the consternation at the court of Charles. Paris trembled for
its safety, and vigorous were the efforts made to get rid of such
dangerous guests. Marshal Cosse, who commanded for his Majesty on the
Flemish border, was too weak to copy successfully the tactics of Alva; but
he employed the resources of diplomacy. His secretary, the Seigneur de
Favelles, not content with remonstrating against the prince's violation of
the territory of a king with whom he was at peace, endeavored to terrify
him by exaggerating the resources of Charles the Ninth and by fabricating
accounts of Huguenot reverses. Conde, he said, had been forced to recross
the river Vienne in great confusion; and there was a flattering prospect
that he would be compelled to shut himself up in La Rochelle; for
"Monseigneur the Duke of Anjou" had an irresistible army of six thousand
horse and twenty-five or thirty thousand foot, besides the forces coming
from Provence under the Count de Tende, the six thousand newly levied
Swiss brought by the Duke d'Aumale, and other considerable bodies of
troops.[624] Gaspard de Schomberg[625] was despatched on a similar errand
by Charles himself, and offered the prince, if he came merely desiring to
pass in a friendly manner through the country, to furnish him with every
facility for so doing. In reply, William of Orange, although the refusal
of his soldiers to fight against Charles[626] left him no alternative but
to embrace the course marked out for him, did not disguise his hearty
sympathy with his suffering brethren in France. In view of the attempts
made, according to his Majesty's edict of September last, to constrain the
conscie