Plessis-Mornay occupied a smaller place than Sully and Villeroi
in the government of Henry IV.; but he held and deserves to keep a great
one in the history of his times. He was the most eminent and also the
most moderate of the men of profound piety and conviction of whom the
Reformation had made a complete conquest, soul and body, and who placed
their public fidelity to their religious creed above every other interest
and every other affair in this world. He openly blamed and bitterly
deplored Henry IV.'s conversion to Catholicism, but he did not ignore the
weighty motives for it; his disapproval and his vexation did not make him
forget the great qualities of his king or the services he was rendering
France, or his own duty and his earlier feelings towards him. This
unbending Protestant, who had contributed as much as anybody to put
Henry IV. on the throne, who had been admitted further than anybody,
except Sully, to his intimacy, who ever regretted that his king had
abandoned his faith, who braved all perils and all disgraces to keep and
maintain his own, this Mornay, malcontent, saddened, all but banished
from court, assailed by his friends' irritation and touched by their
sufferings, never took part against the king whom he blamed, and of whom
he thought he had to complain, in any faction or any intrigue; on the
contrary, he remained unshakably faithful to him, incessantly striving to
maintain or re-establish in the Protestant church in France some little
order and peace, and between the Protestants and Henry IV. some little
mutual confidence and friendliness. Mornay had made up his mind to serve
forever a king who had saved his country. He remained steadfast and
active in his creed, but without falling beneath the yoke of any
narrow-minded idea, preserving his patriotic good sense in the midst of
his fervent piety, and bearing with sorrowful constancy his friends'
bursts of anger and his king's exhibitions of ingratitude. Between 1597
and 1605 three incidents supervened which put to the proof Henry IV.'s
feelings towards his old and faithful servant. In October, 1597, Mornay,
still governor of Saumur, had gone to Angers to concert plans with
Marshal de Brissac for an expedition which, by order of the king, they
were to make into Brittany against the Duke of Mercoeur, not yet reduced
to submission. As he was passing along the street with only three or
four of his men, he was unexpectedly attacked by one Sieur de