uch humility would
induce them to place it again upon his head. He abandoned the minions who
had been his pride, his joy, and his defence, and deprecated, with an
abject whimper, all responsibility for the unmeasured ambition and the
insatiable rapacity of a few private individuals. He conjured the
party-leaders, who had hurled defiance in his face, to lay down their
arms, and promised that they should find in his wisdom and bounty more
than all the advantages which they were seeking to obtain by war.

Henry of Navarre answered in a different strain. The gauntlet had at last
been thrown down to him, and he came forward to take it up; not
insolently nor carelessly, but with the cold courtesy of a Christian
knight and valiant gentleman. He denied the charge of heresy. He avowed
detestation of all doctrines contrary to the Word of God, to the decrees
of the Fathers of the Church, or condemned by the Councils.

The errors and abuses which had from time to time crept into the church,
had long demanded, in the opinion of all pious persons, some measures of
reform. After many bloody wars, no better remedy had been discovered to
arrest the cause of these dire religious troubles, whether in France or
Germany, than to permit all men to obey the dictates of their own
conscience. The Protestants had thus obtained in France many edicts by
which the peace of the kingdom had been secured. He could not himself be
denounced as a heretic, for he had always held himself ready to receive
instruction, and to be set right where he had erred. To call him
"relapsed" was an outrage. Were it true, he were indeed unworthy of the
crown, but the world knew that his change at the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew had been made under duresse, and that he had returned to the
reformed faith when he had recovered his liberty. Religious toleration
had been the object of his life. In what the tyranny of the popes and the
violence of the Spaniards had left him of his kingdom of Navarre,
Catholics and Protestants enjoyed a perfect religious liberty. No man had
the right, therefore, to denounce him as an enemy of the church, or a
disturber of the public repose, for he had ever been willing to accept
all propositions of peace which left the rights of conscience protected.

He was a Frenchman, a prince of France, a living member of the kingdom;
feeling with its pains, and bleeding with its wounds. They who denounced
him were alien to France, factitious portions of