The Guise family was descended from a duke of Lorraine who had attached himself to the court of Francis I. It was really a foreign family, inasmuch as Lorraine was then a dependency of the Holy Roman Empire, but the patriotic exploits of the head of the family in defending Metz against the Emperor Charles V and in capturing Calais from the English endeared the Guises to a goodly part of the French nation. The duke of Guise remained a stanch Catholic, and his brother, called the Cardinal of Lorraine, was head of as many as twelve bishoprics, which gave him an enormous revenue and made him the most conspicuous churchman in France. During the reign of Henry II (1547-1559) the Guises were especially influential. They fought valiantly in foreign wars. They spurred on the king to a great persecution of the Huguenots. They increased their own landed estates. And they married one of their relatives--Mary, queen of Scots--to the heir to the throne. But after the brief reign of Mary's husband, Francis II (1559-1560), the Guise family encountered not only the active opposition of their chief noble rivals, the Bourbons, with their Huguenot allies, but likewise the jealousy and crafty intrigues of Catherine de' Medici. [Sidenote: Religious Wars in France] Catherine feared both the ambition of the powerful Guise family and the disruptive tendencies of Protestantism. The result was a long series of confused civil wars between the ardent followers, respectively Catholic and Protestant, of the Guise and Bourbon families, in which the queen-mother gave support first to one side and then to the other. There were no fewer than eight of these sanguinary conflicts, each one ending with the grant of slight concessions to the Huguenots and the maintenance of the weak kings upon the throne. The massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day (1572) was a horrible incident of Catherine's policy of "trimming." Fearing the undue influence over the king of Admiral de Coligny, an upright and able Huguenot leader, the queen-mother, with the aid of the Guises, prevailed upon the weak-minded Charles IX to authorize the wholesale assassination of Protestants. The signal was given by the ringing of a Parisian church-bell at two o'clock in the morning of 24 August, 1572, and the slaughter went on throughout the day in the capital and for several weeks in the provinces. Coligny was murdered; even women and children were not spared. It is estimated that in all at least three thousand--perhaps ten thousand--lost their lives. [Sidenote: The "Politiques"]