k its flag. Grenville had
refused to surrender, and was carried mortally wounded to die in a
Spanish ship. "Here die I, Richard Grenville," were his last words,
"with a joyful and a quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a good
soldier ought to do, who has fought for his country and his queen, for
honour and religion." But the drift of the French war soon forced
Elizabeth back again into the strife. In each of the French provinces
the civil war went on: and in Britanny, where the contest raged
fiercest, Philip sent the Leaguers a supply of Spanish troops. Normandy
was already in Catholic hands, and the aim of the Spanish king was to
secure the western coast for future operations against England.
Elizabeth pressed Henry the Fourth to foil these projects, and in the
winter of 1591 she sent money and men to aid him in the siege of Rouen.

[Sidenote: Henry's conversion.]

To save Rouen Philip was again forced to interrupt his work of conquest
in the Netherlands. Parma marched anew into the heart of France, and
with the same consummate generalship as of old relieved the town without
giving Henry a chance of battle. But the day was fast going against the
Leaguers. The death of their puppet-king, Charles the Tenth, left them
without a sovereign to oppose to Henry of Navarre; and their scheme of
conferring the crown on Isabella, Philip's daughter by Elizabeth of
France, with a husband whom Philip should choose, awoke jealousies in
the house of Guise itself, while it gave strength to the national party
who shrank from laying France at the feet of Spain. Even the Parliament
of Paris, till now the centre of Catholic fanaticism, protested against
setting the crown of France on the brow of a stranger. The politicians
drew closer to Henry of Navarre, and the moderate Catholics pressed for
his reconciliation to the Church as a means of restoring unity to the
realm. The step had become so inevitable that even the Protestants were
satisfied with Henry's promise of toleration; and in the summer of 1593
he declared himself a Catholic. With his conversion the civil war came
practically to an end. It was in vain that Philip strove to maintain the
zeal of the Leaguers, or that the Guises stubbornly kept the field. All
France drew steadily to the king. Paris opened her gates in the spring
of 1594, and the chief of the Leaguers, the Duke of Mayenne, submitted
at the close of the year. Even Rome abandoned the contest, and at the
end of 1