Henry M. Baird · 132 of 379

CHAPTER VIII · Antoine of Navarre, Condé, and other princes favor the Reformation.

The auspicious moment was seized by the Cardinal of Lorraine to induce Henry, on the ninth of January, to hold in parliament a lit de justice, and compel the court to register in his presence the obnoxious edict of the previous year, establishing the inquisition. But the engine which had been esteemed both by Pope and king the only sure means of repressing heresy, failed of its end. New churches arose; those that previously existed rapidly grew. The Reformation, also, now, for the first time, was openly avowed by men of the first rank in the kingdom. Its opponents were filled with dismay upon beholding Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, his brother Louis, Prince of Condé, and François d'Andelot, brother of Admiral Coligny, at the head of the hitherto despised "Lutherans." Antoine de Bourbon-Vendôme was, next to the reigning monarch and his children, the first prince of the blood. Since his marriage with Jeanne d'Albret—in consequence of which he became titular King of Navarre—he had resided for much of the time in the city of Pan, where his more illustrious son, Henry the Fourth, was born. Here he had attended the preaching of Protestant ministers. On his return to court, not long after the capture of Calais, he took the decided step of frequenting the gatherings of the Parisian Protestants. Subsequently he rescued a prominent minister—Antoine de Chandieu—from the Châtelet, in which he was imprisoned, by going in person and claiming him as a member of his household. Well would it have been for France had the Navarrese king always displayed the same courage. Condé and D'Andelot were scarcely less valuable accessions to the ranks of the Protestants.