The project of a double marriage—between the young king with an infanta of Spain, and of the prince of the Asturias with a daughter of France—a project supported by the Holy See—redoubled the fears of the Huguenots. It was generally rumoured that one of the conditions of the alliance between the two courts, was the destruction of heresy, and the (Roman) Catholic preachers took this as the text of their sermons. “If the Jesuits,” wrote Duplessis-Mornay to the chancellor De Sillery, “preach without circumlocution, that the design of this double marriage with Spain is to be the extirpation of heresy, can any one be surprised that our churches should take alarm, and that the minutes of the assemblies should speak of it?” The Prince de Condé, a bigoted (Roman) Catholic, as we have seen, tried to turn the disquietude of the Calvinist party to the advantage of his personal cause, by invoking the memory of his father and grandfather. He published a manifesto in 1615, in which he told the Reformers that the Edict of Nantes would be abolished, and that the king’s only object in collecting his troops was their extermination. These provocations carried away some gentlemen of the political assemblies of Grenoble and Nismes. The Duke de Rohan took the field on the side of Saintonge; but the body of the Calvinists, including Lesdiguières, Châtillon, Sully, and Mornay, did not rise. The last wrote on this occasion, that “a negotiation would be renewed, by means of which the prince would be contented; while their churches would remain behind, loaded with all the odium, and perhaps also with the war itself.” This is exactly what happened. Condé made his peace with the court, without any regard for the position or the interests of his allies. A more serious event—the oppression of the Reformation in Béarn—occurred to furnish more weighty motives for the recommencement of the wars of religion. The principality of Basse-Navarre and Béarn, annexed to France by Henry IV., was more closely re-united in 1617. Three-fourths of the population, some say nine-tenths, belonged to the Reformed communion. They were nevertheless ordered to reinstate the priests in all the ecclesiastical property which had been applied, since the year 1569, to the use of the churches, schools, hospitals, and poor. The Jesuit Arnoux said that this property “_belonged to God, who was its owner_,” and that consequently no one had the power or the right to take it.