United States or Kosovo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There, surrounded by the swart and grizzly bearded visages of these strange men-at-arms, who were discharging their arquebuses, as they advanced upon any bystanders likely to oppose their progress; in the very midst of this sea of helmed heads, the envoy was enabled to recognise the martial figure of the Prince of Bearne.
And the Archduke Ernest, although he invited Mayenne to confer with him at Brussels, under the impression that he could still keep him and the Duke of Guise from coming to an arrangement with Bearne, hardly felt more confidence in the man than did Feria or Ybarra.
These were the very Parisians, who, but three years before, had been feeding on rats and dogs and dead men's bones, and the bodies of their own children, rather than open their gates to this same Prince of Bearne.
Feria wrote a despatch to the king, denouncing Mayenne as false, pernicious to the cause of Spain and of catholicism, thoroughly self-seeking and vile, and as now most traitorous to the cause of the confederacy, engaged in surrendering its strong places to the enemy, and preparing to go over to the Prince of Bearne.
No human being at that moment, assuredly, could look into the immediate future accurately enough to see whether the name and memory of the man, whom his adherents called Henry the Fourth of France, and whom Spaniards, legitimists and enthusiastic papists, called the Prince of Bearne, were to be for ever excluded from the archives of France; whether Henry, after spending the whole of his life as a pretender, was destined to bequeath the same empty part to his descendants, should they think it worth their while to play it.
If the Prince of Bearne had already destroyed the Holy League, why should not the Duke of Mayenne and Archduke Ernest make another for him, and so conquer France without further delay?
The Duke of Nemours confessed that there were occasions when they never would have been able to sustain a determined onslaught, and they were daily expecting to see the Prince of Bearne battering triumphantly at their gates.
Maurice then shipped the remainder of his troops along the Rhine and Waal to their winter quarters and returned to the Hague. It was the feeblest year's work yet done by the stadholder. Meantime his great ally, the Huguenot-Catholic Prince of Bearne, was making a dashing, and, on the whole, successful campaign in the heart of his own kingdom.
Especially he denied the necessity or the legality of an assembly of all the prelates of France, such as Henry desired to afford him the requisite "instruction" as to the respective merits of the Roman and the reformed Church. Certainly, he urged, the Prince of Bearne could hardly require instruction as to the tenets of either, seeing that at different times he had faithfully professed both.
The Prince of Bearne heretic, son of heretics, great chieftain of heretics was supposed capable of becoming orthodox whenever the Pope would accept his conversion. Against this possibility Philip struggled with all his strength. Since Pope Sixtus V., who had a weakness for Henry, there had been several popes. Urban VII., his immediate successor, had reigned but thirteen days.
Word Of The Day