Remorse for the massacre of St Bartholomew had deprived Charles IX. of his reason, and brought him to an early grave. His brother, Henry III., who succeeded him, either awed by the fate of Charles, or occupied only with his pleasures, allowed those same Protestants whom, as Duke of Anjou, he had defeated at Moncontour and other places, to live in peace. Henry’s indolence favoured the ambitious views of the Duke of Guise, who aspired at nothing less than the throne of France. He and his partisans, particularly the Jesuits, stirred up the fanaticism of the more bigoted of the citizens against the king, who, although a scrupulous observer of all those external practices in which the Popish religion chiefly consists, was considered by the Church party a bad Catholic. A remedy was to be found, lest France should become a Protestant country. An association was accordingly set on foot, which took the name of the League, or “Holy Union.” The vulgar saw in it the bulwark of the faith—Philip of Spain, indirectly the sovereignty of France—and Henry of Guise, the throne. The members of this association took the following oath:—“I swear to God, the Creator, and under penalty of anathema and eternal damnation, that I have entered into this Catholic Association, according to the form of the treaty which has just been read to me, loyally and sincerely either to command, or to obey and serve; and I promise with my life and my honour, to continue therein to the last drop of my blood, without resisting it or withdrawing from it, at any command, or any pretext, excuse, or occasion whatsoever.”[166] In 1577, Guise was declared chief of the League; and in 1584, he, a subject, had the audacity to enter publicly into a confederacy with Philip II. of Spain. The Articles of Alliance purported, “that a confederacy, offensive and defensive, was entered into betwixt the king and the Catholic princes in behalf of themselves and their descendants, for the maintenance of the Roman Catholic religion in France as well as the Low Countries: and, on the death of Henry III., to take measures that Cardinal de Bourbon should be appointed his successor; the heretic and relapsed princes being for ever excluded from the right of succession.”[167]