domestic traitors, aided by foreign
despots and sympathizers, was at last successful, and the fratricidal war
in France was approaching its only possible conclusion.

But, alas! the hopes of those who loved the reformed Church as well as
they loved their country were sadly blasted by the apostasy of their
leader. From the most eminent leaders of the Huguenots there came a wail,
which must have penetrated even to the well-steeled heart of the cheerful
Gascon. "It will be difficult," they said, "to efface very soon from your
memory the names of the men whom the sentiment of a common religion,
association in the same perils and persecutions, a common joy in the same
deliverance, and the long experience of so many faithful services, have
engraved there with a pencil of diamond. The remembrance of these things
pursues you and accompanies you everywhere; it interrupts your most
important affairs, your most ardent pleasures, your most profound
slumber, to represent to you, as in a picture, yourself to yourself:
yourself not as you are to-day, but such as you were when, pursued to the
death by the greatest princes of Europe, you went on conducting to the
harbour of safety the little vessel against which so many tempests were
beating."

The States of the Dutch republic, where the affair of Henry's conversion
was as much a matter of domestic personal interest as it could be in
France--for religion up to that epoch was the true frontier between
nation and nation--debated the question most earnestly while it was yet
doubtful. It was proposed to send a formal deputation to the king, in
order to divert him, if possible, from the fatal step which he was about
to take. After ripe deliberation however, it was decided to leave the
matter "in the hands of God Almighty, and to pray Him earnestly to guide
the issue to His glory and the welfare of the Churches."

The Queen of England was, as might be supposed, beside herself with
indignation, and, in consequence of the great apostasy, and of her
chronic dissatisfaction with the manner in which her contingent of troops
had been handled in France, she determined to withdraw every English
soldier from the support of Henry's cause. The unfortunate French
ambassador in London was at his wits' ends. He vowed that he could not
sleep of nights, and that the gout and the cholic, to which he was always
a martyr, were nothing to the anguish which had now come upon his soul
and brain, such as he had n