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 of England, the royal assent was withheld, and the parliament was prorogued.

In September 1567 the civil war again broke out in France. Again the Huguenots were worsted; again there was peace, both sides anxious to gain time. Next year (September, Cal. Dom. 1547–80, pp. 3–6) the Cardinal Chatillon, Coligny's brother, slipped away to England to gain the ear of Elizabeth. He seems to have had some money given him for the cause, little enough we may be sure (Hatfield MSS. i. 404, No. 1287), but he returned in November with fair promises (Nos. 1207–8). Elizabeth intended to help the Huguenots at Rochelle (Cal. Dom. 1547–80, p. 318, No. 92). In the spring of 1569 the war broke out with the old fury. This time Condé was opposed by Henry, duke of Anjou, brother of Charles IX and afterwards Henry III. On 13 March, at the battle of Jarnac, Condé died the death of a hero. Anjou, now in his nineteenth year, won well-deserved laurels. The protestant cause appeared desperate. Coligny and his brother Dandelot alone remained. It was Jeanne d'Albret, wife of Antony, king of Navarre, who gave the cause a new life. When least expected she appeared at Saintes, where the remains of the protestant forces were, with her son, Henry of Navarre, and the boy of fifteen was welcomed as the commander of the Huguenot armies. The peace of St. Germain (8 Aug. 1570) was a pretence of settlement once more, giving the Huguenots a certain measure of toleration and four cities of refuge, of which Rochelle was the most important. The policy of conciliation for a time prevailed. Charles offered his sister Margaret to young Henry of Navarre, and the hand of his brother, the Duke of Anjou, to the queen of England. This was in April 1571. Elizabeth was in her thirty-eighth year, Anjou was twenty. She amused herself with the new negotiations. While they were going on the evil day for the Huguenots was postponed. But Anjou was not the man to be used as a plaything. If he saw his way to a crown and something more, he would sacrifice himself. When he became convinced that the queen meant nothing serious, he threw her over, July 1571. In October Catherine de' Medici, the queen mother, was offering her youngest son, the Duke d'Alençon, as a substitute for his brother. The negotiations dropped for a while, but were renewed in February 1572, and continued from month to month, Catherine de' Medici being desperately in earnest, Elizabeth at this time scarcely pretending to be sincere. On 8 May parliament had assembled; on the 29th the Earl of Northumberland was sold by the Scots, after much higgling about the price to be paid, and delivered into the hands of Lord Hunsdon at Berwick. Hunsdon hated the vile business, and when an order came from the queen that he must carry his prisoner to execution at York he flatly refused to obey. The hateful office fell to another, and on 22 Aug. Northumberland was sacrificed.

The horrible tidings of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 24 Aug. 1572, reached Elizabeth at Woodstock. At first she refused to give the French ambassador an audience. When she did she received him with impressive solemnity of manner, the whole court being dressed in deep mourning. The lords of the council turned away from the representative of the king of France with coldness and silence; but the ambassador himself actually, at this very audience, ventured to present the queen with a love-letter from the Duke d'Alençon, which we are told she not only accepted but read there and then!

The year of the St. Bartholomew massacre marks an epoch in the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth. With this year begins that long episode in the queen's life which goes by the name of the Alençon marriage. Francis, duke d'Alençon, was a hideous dwarf. In childhood he had escaped from the small-pox with his life, but the foul disease had left him blotched and scarred and stunted. A frightful enlargement at the end of his nose had divided into two, and the wits of the time made themselves merry with his ‘double nose,’ apt symbol, they said, of his double-facedness. Like all his brothers, he was licentious and unscrupulous. He had little education, and no religious principle, at one time siding with the catholic party, at another posing as a Huguenot leader in France, or accepting the sovereignty of the states of the Netherlands under conditions which he never meant to observe. His pock-marked face and discoloured skin as he dropped into a seat made him look like a frog, and Elizabeth called him, and he cheerfully accepted the name, her ‘petite grenouille.’ This was the lover whom the queen of England kept hoping and languishing for twelve long years, and whom, when he died, worn out by debauchery, on 9 June 1584, Elizabeth declared she had loved so entirely that she could not in his place accept the hand of the hero, Henry of Navarre. Three times he came to England. She kissed his lips in the presence of the French ambassador, of Walsingham, and of Leicester. In November 1581 she let it go forth to the whole of Europe that she would marry at last. Lord Burghley, in his own hand, drew up a digest of the incidents