Protestantism in France From Death of Francis I to Edict of Nantes - James Aitken Wylie

dealing him the unkindest cut of all,
excommunicated him. Within a year of the duke's
death a provisional government, with a younger
brother of Guise's at its head, was installed at the
Hotel de Ville. Henry, appalled by this outburst of
indignation, fled to Tours, where such of the
nobility as adhered to the royalist cause, with 2,000
soldiers, gathered round him.
This force was not at all adequate to cope with
the army of the League, and the king had nothing
for it but to accept the hand which Henry of
Navarre held out to him, and which he had aforetime
rejected., Considering that Henry, as Duke of
Anjou, had been one of the chief instigators of the
St. Bartholomew Massacre, it must have cost him,
one would imagine, a severe struggle of feeling to
accept the aid of the Huguenots; and not less must
they have felt it, we should think, unseemly and
anomalous to ally their cause with that of the
murderer of their brethren. But the flower of the
Huguenots were in their grave; the King of Navarre
was not the high-minded hero that Coligny had
been. We find now a lower type of Huguenotism
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