was necessary to an invalid, removed him to a solitary house called the Kirk of Field. On the 9th of February, 1567, this house was blown up with gunpowder, and the unfortunate Darnley's lifeless body carried to some distance, where it was found without any external mark of violence. The measures taken by Mary to screen Bothwell, universally regarded as the author of this crime, and her subsequent marriage to that nobleman, seemed conclusive evidence that she had countenanced her husband's murder. The Scottish lords flew to arms; Mary was forced to yield herself a prisoner to her irritated subjects, and Bothwell fled into exile.

The unfortunate queen, confined in Lochleven castle, was forced to abdicate in favor of her son, who was crowned with the title of James VI. She escaped from her prison, and soon found herself at the head of a numerous army, but within eleven days from her deliverance she was completely defeated in the battle of Langside, and forced to seek refuge in England (A. D. 1568). Elizabeth placed the fugitive in close custody, a measure which her safety perhaps demanded, but which was scarcely consistent with her honor. The insurrections of the catholic lords in the northern counties, and Mary's intrigues with the duke of Norfolk, combined with the open attempts of the catholic states against Elizabeth, rendered the unfortunate queen's detention a matter of prudent expediency, if not of prime necessity.

The imbecile Francis II. succeeded his father Henry on the throne of France; during his brief reign he was the mere tool of the Guises, whose great anxiety was to establish the inquisition in France. Philip II. was engaged in a similar attempt in the Netherlands, and both pro· voked a desperate resistance. Like his father Charles V., Philip was ambitious of universal monarchy, but he used different means; he hoped to gain the clergy by his zeal, to win the nobles by the bribes which the wealth of Spanish America enabled him to offer, and to subdue the people by the united efforts of ecclesiastical and aristocratic influence. But in the Netherlands, as in France, the proposal to establish the inquisition was a fatal error of despotism; it provoked the fierce resistance of all who were worthy of their country, it identified the papacy with cruelty and slavery, it gave to the reformed leaders the proud title of deliverers of their country. The election of Pius IV. to the chair oi St. Peter precipitated the civil war in France (A. D. 1560). A conspiracy was formed for removing the Guises, in which many arden. catholics joined; it was discovered and defeated, but the sanguinary cruelty of the Lorraine princes rendered their victory injurious to their cause; the memory of the martyrs they slaughtered won proselytes and confirmed opposition. So powerful were the Huguenots, that lib erty of conscience was sanctioned in an assembly of the Notables a Fontainebleau; and it was proposed to convoke a national council for regulating the affairs of the Gallican church. Had France been ruled by an energetic sovereign, acquainted with the interests of his crowr and the wishes of the nation, the French church at this moment might have been rendered as independent of Rome as the English: the pope saw the danger, and he induced Francis to abandon the national synod, by promising the speedy convocation of a general council. Both the emperor and the king of France objected to reassembling the bishops

at Trent, declaring that its name was odious to the protestants; but the ill health of Francis II., who was fast sinking into the grave, induced Pius to quicken his proceedings, and bulls for the continuation of the council were issued. In the meantime the states-general assembled in France. The prince of Condé and the king of Navarre, the great leaders of the Huguenot party, were arrested when they appeared at court, and the former received sentence of death. But the queenmother, Catherine de Medicis, dreading that the regency would be seized by the Guises when the king died, secretly intrigued with the Huguenots to secure their support, and the life of Condé was the pledge and the reward of their assistance. But while she thus courted the alliance of the protestants, she secretly informed Philip II. that her hatred of the Reformation was unabated, and that she only waited a favorable opportunity to imitate his example of merciless butchery and persecution. She intrigued with both parties, a fatal error; for had she frankly embraced one, she would have stamped the other with the character of revolt; her Italian cunning only served to render civil war inevitable.

The duke of Guise saw clearly that, to sustain the part he designed to act, it was necessary to attempt something of more than ordinary magnitude; he raised the cry "the church is in danger;" ignorance and bigotry responded to the summons; he placed himself at the head of the zealous supporters of papal infallibility, hoping to destroy, by one blow, the queen-regent, who was suspected of culpable indifference to the interests of the faith, the government, which seemed ready to recognise the principles of toleration, and the Huguenots. Like his opponents, he appealed to the people, and attempted to guide public opinion; like them, too, he declared himself the steadfast friend of the monarchy: thus the struggle between the two parties had for its prize the throne of France, and for its pretext the defence of royalty.

In the meantime, the council of Trent continued its deliberations, without showing any symptom of a desire to conciliate the spirit of the age, by improving either the doctrine or the discipline of the church. The bishops wasted their time in scholastic disputations, and proved how delusive were their professions of a desire for peace, by celebrating the victory obtained over the Huguenots at Dreux, by a public thanksgiving. In fact, the council terrified nobody but Pius IV., who saw his power attacked on every side. Maximilian, the son of the emperor Ferdinand, having been elected king of the Romans, refused for a long time to receive the sanction of his election from the pontiff, and finally accepted it as a mere ceremony, venerable on account of its antiquity; it would have been better for the holy see to have abjured such a privilege, than to have it preserved as a subject of ridicule and mockery.

But though the public proceedings at Trent were far from injuring the progress of the Reformation, there were secret plans devised fraught with imminent peril to the protestants. One of these was revealed, by the imprudence of the cardinal of Lorraine. On the 10th of May, 1563, he read a letter from his niece, Mary, queen of Scots, "submitting herself to the council, and promising that when she succeeded to the throne of England, she would subject both her kingdoms to the

obedience due to the apostolic see." He added, verbally, that sne would have sent prelates, as representatives of Scotland, to the council, had she not been restrained by the necessity of keeping terms with her heretical councillors. The Italians were engaged everywhere alarming monarchs with the republican tendency of the Reformation; a charge which seemed to derive some support from the revolts of the peasants in Germany, the troubles in Flanders, and the confusion of France. Philip II. was not the only sovereign who regarded heretics as rebels, and believed that the papacy would be found an efficient aid to despotism in crushing civil as well as religious liberty.

At length the council of Trent terminated its sittings; eighteen years of debate had produced no plan of reform for ecclesiastical morals, discipline, or doctrine (A. D. 1564). One of the last acts of the assembled fathers was to issue an anathema against heretics, which justified the protestants in their refusal to recognise the acts of the council. But we should commit a great error if we supposed that this last of the general councils produced no change in the constitution of the papacy, it organized the spiritual despotism of the popes, clearly perceiving that the temporal empire was irrecoverably lost, and it placed the holy see in the position of an ally to the monarchs who were eager to maintain despotic power. From the time of this council to the present day, every sovereign of France and Spain, remarkable for hostility to constitutional freedom, has been equally conspicuous for his attachment to the holy see, and the articles of faith ratified by the council of Trent. It was by this assembly that the marriage of priests was definitely prohibited. We have already shown how necessary an element this law has been to the spiritual despotism possessed, and temporal supremacy claimed, by the pope. Family and country had no ties on the bishops of the catholic church; Rome enjoyed exclusive possession of every feeling that can render man a good subject or a good citizen; the infallibility and omnipotence of the pope were made articles of faith, by prelates whose whole heart was engaged in supporting the supremacy of the holy see; the popes could rouse nations to revolt, and trouble empires, because they had obedient emissaries in every parish; the doctrine of implicit submission to the successors of St. Peter was taught by priests, when it could not be enforced by armies, and it was found sufficiently efficacious to harass Europe with a century of war. Pius IV. comprehended the immense value of an unmarried clergy; though he had violently condemned the administration of the eucharist in both kinds, he relaxed the prohibition at the instance of the emperor Maximilian, and permitted the cup to be given to the laity in Germany; but on the point of celibacy he was inflexible, for he was justly convinced that it was the great bond by which all the portions of papal domination were united, and that if it should be relaxed, the entire edifice would fall in sunder.

After the dissolution of the council, a general suspicion was diffused through the protestants of Europe, that a league for their destruction had been formed by some of the leading catholic powers. It is now sufficiently notorious that these suspicions were not groundless, and that Pius IV. was weary of the slow steps by which the members of this pretended holy alliance advanced to the verge of an exterminating

war. He earnestly urged a personal interview between Catherine de Medicis and Philip II.; it was declined by the latter on account of his ill health, but he sent a worthy representative, the duke of Alva, to hold a conference with the queen-regent and her son, Charles IX., at Bayonne. The pretext for the meeting was an interview between the young queen of Spain and her mother, Catherine de Medicis; but the presence of the duke of Alva, the avowed enemy of the protestants, whose extirpation he openly proclaimed to be his most solemn duty to God or man, was a clear proof that more important designs were con templated. The days were spent in all the sports and festivities that are to be found in a luxurious and licentious court. But at the dead hour of midnight, when the courtiers, exhausted by the tournament, the table, and the dance, retired to repose, Catherine held secret conferen ces with Alva in the apartments of her probably unconscious daughter, Elizabeth. They agreed in their object, the destruction of the Huguenots, and all the parties disposed to place restrictions on the royal authority in the French and Spanish dominions, but they differed very widely as to the means by which this might be most effectually accomplished. Alva recommended the most violent measures, edicts of extermination supported by powerful armies, military execution of all who ventured to offer any opposition, and a general massacre of the Huguenot congregations. But though Catherine would not have shown any scruple in adopting these, or even more atrocious plans, she was well aware that Alva's projects could not be executed without the aid of a Spanish army, and she was too jealous of her own authority to allow a foreign court to exercise any influence in the kingdom which she governed as regent. She relied on her own craft and cunning to retain power, for her zeal for religion was always made subservient to her ambition, and she was infinitely more afraid of any combination of the nobles of France to restrain the royal authority, than of the real or supposed progress of heretical opinions. She hated the Huguenots rather as a political than as a religious body, for the aristocratic leaders of the sect were more bent on rendering the nobles independent of the crown, than of delivering the Gallican church from the power of the pope, and it was the aristocratic character thus imprinted on the principles of the reformation in France, which prevented the protestant movement from ever becoming popular with the great body of the middle and the lower ranks in France. In their minds it was associated with feudalism, which had become so odious to the French people that they would have accepted the worst form of oriental despotism in preference.

Philip began to execute his part of the agreement by a vigorous effort to establish the Inquisition in Flanders; and to put an end to the insurrection which such a measure provoked, he appointed the duke of Alva lord lieutenant of the Netherlands, with almost absolute authority. Many of the Flemish merchants and manufacturers left their country; they brought their industry and their capital to England; a circumstance which had no small share in the rapid growth of England's commercial prosperity. The cruelties of Alva, the noble resistance of the prince of Orange, long the head and hope of the protestant party in Europe, and the final establishment of the independence of the Seven United Provinces, belong to general history; but in this narrative we

must not omit to mention, that Philip's brutal obstinacy was frequently blamed by the court of Rome; the crafty Italians would have preferred fraud to violence, and assassination to the perils of open war (a. D. 1572). It must also be mentioned, that the Turks joined in the contest as the protectors of the Flemings, and that their defeat by Don John of Austria, at Lepanto, finally delivered Europe from the perils with which it was menaced by Mohammedan barbarism. Pius V., who ascended the papal throne (A. D. 1566), was disposed to take advantage of the victory at Lepanto, and organize a league against the Turks; but Philip was jealous of the glory acquired by his brother, and he declared that nothing should divert him from the prosecution of the war in Flanders. This pontiff, who was afterward canonized as a saint, was inflexible in his hatred of the protestants but he made some efforts to remedy the evils of the church by founding schools and colleges, and excluding persons of immoral life from ecclesiastical dignities. He was succeeded by Gregory XIII.

In the spring of 1560, the French protestants were detected in a conspiracy for taking the infant king out of the hands of the persecuting Guises, and expelling the entire Lorraine family from France. The massacres with which this crime was punished, produced retaliation; a civil war ensued, which, interrupted by short and unsteady truces, lasted to 1570, when a treaty, favorable to the Huguenots, was concluded at St. Germains. To cement this peace, a marriage was proposed between the young king of Navarre, the hereditary leader of the French protestants, and the princess Margaret, the beautiful sister of the king of France. The proposal diffused such universal joy, that even the more violent of the catholic party were forced to acquiesce, and preparations were made for celebrating the nuptials at Paris with extraordinary magnificence. Admiral Coligni and the other protestant leaders were invited to witness the festivities, and the chief catholic lords, headed by the duke of Guise, came to share in the general reconciliation.

The events which led to the fearful tragedy that accompanied this marriage, have been so misrepresented by party writers on every side, that it is desirable to state the facts at some length, as they have been narrated by the principal actors themselves. At this period the populace of Paris was the most bigoted and sanguinary mob to be found in Europe. They went beyond the most cruel edicts of their rulers in persecuting all who were suspected of heretical opinions, and not unfrequently took the law into their own hands, against the wishes of the court and the clergy. The presence of Coligni and the protestant lords, was, therefore, a source of indignant grief to the fanatical multitude, and nothing but the presence of the royal guards prevented outburst of popular violence. Guise and his friends, opposed to the Huguenots as heretics, and to their leaders as rivals, fostered this general discontent, while the queen-mother, Catherine, negotiated with both parties, believing that she could only retain power by balancing one against the other.

Charles IX., feeble in body, and weak in intellect, had just attained his legal majority, but the real power of the state was wielded by Catherine and her favorite son, Henry, for whom she always showed herself