distrust was unworthy of a monarch who has left a great name in history. He showed himself indulgent to those of his courtiers and officers who organised resistance to the influence and pretensions of the Guises. "One time, amongst others," says M. de Bouillé, "the Duke of Guise, governor of Burgundy, wishing to visit the castle of Auxonne, whose governorship was a charge distinct from that of the province, the titulary, Rouvray, a French gentleman, refused him admittance, which he would not have dared to do had Guise been recognised as prince. When the Duke complained of this treatment, the King, delighted, whilst taking advantage of his services, to see his pride and ambition thwarted, lauded the conduct of Rouvray, and laughed at him who had wished to play the prince of royal blood." For annoyances of this kind Guise sought compensation in popularity, thus tracing out for his descendants the line they should most advantageously follow. The partial disfavour into which the Guises had fallen, during an interval of peace when their services were not indispensable, was dissipated by the zeal and talents exhibited by the Duke's brother, John Cardinal of Lorraine, in a most difficult and delicate negotiation with Charles V., and by the prompt good-will with which, when negotiation failed and war broke out, the Duke hurried to the relief of Peronne, accompanied by his eldest son, the Count of Aumale, then scarcely nineteen years old. Peronne la Pucelle was hard beset by the Count of Nassau, who pounded its ramparts with seventy-two pieces of cannon, and was defended with equal valour by Fleuranges, Marshal de la Marck, who repulsed an assault made simultaneously by two breaches, and destroyed a mine on which the enemy reckoned for his discomfiture. Want of supplies, and especially of powder, must soon, however, have compelled him to yield, but for a stratagem practised by Guise. That able commander selected four hundred resolute soldiers, loaded each of them with a bag containing ten pounds of powder, and set out, at six in the evening, from his headquarters at Ham, with the Count of Aumale, whose first experience of war this was, and to whom Guise, as he wrote to the King, "intended soon to give up his sword, as capable of doing better service in his young hands than in his own." Two hundred horsemen escorted them as far as the edge of the marshes of Peronne, and at midnight Guise, who had brought with him a large number of drummers and trumpeters, distributed these at different points around the besiegers' camp. Whilst they sounded and beat the charge, and the Imperialist generals, believing themselves attacked on all sides, hastily formed their troops for the combat, the powder-bearers, guided by a soldier of the garrison who had borne news of its distress from Fleuranges to Guise, crossed the marshes by means of a number of little roads and bridges, which the enemy himself had made to maintain his communications, and reached