s of a sermon," says Brantome, "and she had
advised her spouse, Anthony de Bourbon, who inclined towards Calvinism,
not to perplex himself with all these opinions." In 1559 she was
passionately devoted to the faith and the cause of the Reformation. With
more levity, but still in sincerity, her brother-in-law, Louis de Conde,
put his ambition and his courage at the service of the same cause.
Admiral de Coligny's youngest brother, Francis d'Andelot, declared
himself a Reformer to Henry II. himself, who, in his wrath, threw a plate
at his head, and sent him to prison in the castle of Melun. Coligny
himself, who had never disguised the favorable sentiments he felt towards
the Reformers, openly sided with them on the ground of his own personal
faith, as well as of the justice due to them. At last the Reformation
had really great leaders, men who had power and were experienced in the
affairs of the world; it was becoming a political party as well as a
religious conviction; and the French Reformers were henceforth in a
condition to make war as well as die at the stake for their faith.
Hitherto they had been only believers and martyrs; they became the
victors and the vanquished, alternately, in a civil war.

A new position for them, and as formidable as it was grand. It was
destined to bring upon them cruel trials and the worth of them in
important successes; first, the Saint-Bartholomew, then the accession of
Henry IV. and the edict of Nantes. At a later period, under Louis XIII.
and Louis XIV., the complication of the religious question and the
political question cost them the advantages they had won; the edict of
Nantes disappeared together with the power of the Protestants in the
state. They were no longer anything but heretics and rebels. A day was
to come, when, by the force alone of moral ideas, and in the name alone
of conscience and justice, they would recover all the rights they had for
a time possessed, and more also; but in the sixteenth century that day
was still distant, and armed strife was for the Reformers their only
means of defence and salvation. God makes no account of centuries, and a
great deal is required before the most certain and the most salutary
truths get their place and their rights in the minds and communities of
men.

On the 29th of June, 1559, a brilliant tournament was celebrated in lists
erected at the end of the street of Saint-Antoine, almost at the foot of
the Bastille. Henry II.