Henry M. Baird · 265 of 379

CHAPTER X · Death of Francis II., Dec. 5, 1560.

The vows which Francis made "to God and to all the saints of paradise, male and female, and particularly to Notre-Dame-de-Cléry, that, if they should grant him restoration of health, he would never cease until he had wholly purged the kingdom of those wicked heretics," proved unavailing. On the fifth of December, 1560, he died in the eighteenth year of his age and the seventeenth month of his reign. "God, who pierced the eye of the father, had now stricken the ear of the son."