CHAPTER IX.

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR.

'HE peace, such as it was, lasted for three years

THE

and a-half. Every effort was made by the Guises to bring Coligny to a trial on the charge of complicity in the murder of the Duke. The Admiral himself wrote three careful and elaborate defences; the Huguenots asked only that there might be a fair trial, and at a meeting of the Council, Condé pointed out that the hostility of the Guises towards the Chatillons was notorious, and should not be made the means of persecuting the Admiral. Montmorency, for his part, declared his intention of employing all his power in the cause of his nephew. A formal inquiry was ordered to be opened, and, at the end of three years, the King pronounced Coligny's innocence to be established, and ordered a reconciliation to be publicly celebrated between him and the widow of the murdered man. This was done. The Cardinal was there, embracing his enemy with lying lips; but Henri and Claude, the sons, refused to be present, and would take no part in the sham.

This widow, the Duchess of Guise, was the daughter of Renée de France, and had been educated in the principles of the Reformed religion. Yet, as became à renegade, there was now no more fanatic Romanist in France, and no more revengeful woman. She never ceased to regard the Admiral, her mother's best and most trusted friend, as her husband's murderer. So far as she was concerned, it was a false and hollow reconciliation. She nourished the hope of vengeance, and became afterwards an accomplice in the Bartholomew conspiracy.

Meantime, the Admiral lived chiefly at his own Castle of Chatillon-sur-Loing, occupied with his domestic affairs, the education of his children, the reception and entertainment of artists, the preparation of memoirs-those which were subsequently burned, to the great loss of history-correspondence with Calvin and other Protestant leaders, and the furtherance of the Huguenot cause. Three boys were left

to him, Gaspard, Francis, and Odet-one more was to be born to him, the only one of the second generation of Huguenot Chatillons who would disgrace the family name-and two daughters, Louise, who afterwards married William the Silent, and became the mother of a long line of kings, queens, electors, and grand-dukes; and Renée, still an infant, whose death was to be one more blow to the longsuffering father. With them his wife, Charlotte de

Laval, fresh from nursing the wounded soldiers in the hospital of Orleans, full of all womanly virtues, steadfast in her faith, fit helpmeet for one on whom was laid, in a manner, the burden of all the nation's sins.

The Admiral was thoughtful for his household first, for his own people next. He procured a worthy tutor, one Le Gresle, for his boys, and enjoined on them the strictest reverence and respect for their master, never ceasing to admonish them to continue steadily in the study of those good books "which lead you in the path of virtue." Then, as he often maintained that universal education would be an incomparable benefit to the world, "seeing that ignorance of letters brings to Church and State many evils," he founded in Chatillon a college where professors of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin taught all comers. He was therefore the first to conceive the idea, as he was the first to attempt its realisation, of universal education. We have seen already the manner in which his household was regulated, with prayers, sermons, and the singing of psalms. Stories abound, which we need not quote here, of the Admiral's continual and patient charity. Some of them are probably invented; but they all point to one certain fact-that, in an age greatly wanting in sympathy, accustomed to the sight of suffering, and therefore callous, this man practised the Christian virtue of charity in the highest sense comprehended

Stories of the Admiral.

175

by the nineteenth century, and perhaps in a spirit more lofty than anything we can understand. For the knowledge of goodness, the appreciation of a higher life, grows with the growth of each individual man. He who would fairly set forth the worth of a great man should be himself possessed of the same qualities, even if not to the same degree. One remembers that legend of the statue of Jesus, which was always taller than the tallest man who stood before it. It seems to me, humbly endeavouring to picture to myself this man as he actually was, as if he, too, thus continually towers above the heads of all who approach him. I fail to find in any gallery of worthies, in any country or any century, any other man so truly and so incomparably great.

As for these stories, there is one which tells how . the Admiral once detected a servant in a plot to poison him. He pardoned him, and dismissed him with the permission to take service under those who would have made him a poisoner-the Guises. He' was always, indeed, in danger of being poisoned or assassinated. Men lurked in the forests when he went hunting, hired, as they said when caught, by one or other member of the Lorraine House. There was no day when he could feel safe. If, for his own part, he rejoiced at the death of Guise, his enemies of that family ardently desired his death, and secretly compassed it. The very virtues of the

man, the trust which he inspired in all alike, a trust so great that the Pope never ceased to wonder why so good a man could be in the Genevese camp; the absence of any evil charge to throw against him; all these things were so many incentives to hatred.

He was, however, no blind partisan of Calvin. He would recognise no Protestant Pope, and refused to allow any spiritual preeminence to the Church of Geneva. He remained a friend to the different parties of the French Protestants, represented whether by Beza or by Ramus, exhorting the ministers above all to live the life, to show an example of the Christian virtues, and especially that of charity. He gave, for his own part, an example of how the Catholics ought to be tolerated by Protestants, by restoring their church at Chatillon to the priests, so that it was said everywhere that there was no place in France where priests could live in greater safety than at Chatillon. For his own part, he confessed that he thus gave up his church, not for his own pleasure, but in obedience to the law. To enforce obedience to the law, to watch for breaches, and to procure redress, was one of his most important occupations during these years. He wrote perpetually to the Queen-mother, urging her to take action in one case and another. "I implore you, Madam, in the name of God," he concludes one letter, "to see to this matter, and you will be the cause that the King shall be served and obeyed."