The States of Béarn, the nobility, the magistrates of the towns, the people, all protested energetically, but in vain. The king took the field at the head of an army, and the Béarnese not being able to oppose more than a short resistance, he entered the town of Pau on the 15th October, 1620. He remained there no longer than two days, “for there was no church there,” says an historian of the time, “where he might thank God, from whom he held this inheritance, and he therefore went to have the mass chanted before his soldiers, at Navarreins, where it had not been solemnized for fifty years previously. Bishops, abbots, and curates re-entered into possession of the property of the church, the Jesuits taking a goodly share.” The course of the royal troops was marked with cruel violence. “Nothing was heard to escape from the mouth of the most moderate,” says Elie Benoît, “but threats of exemplary punishment; of hanging, decapitating, and abolishing the Reformed religion throughout the whole kingdom, which they called _accursed_; of banishing all who professed it, or of compelling them to wear some badge of infamy.” The soldiers shattered the doors of the churches, demolished the walls, tore the books and the tables where the commandments of God were written. They robbed and maltreated the peasants with their staves and their swords, who came to the market of Pau, adjudging them beforehand to be all Huguenots. They forced the Reformers, who fell into their hands, to make the sign of the cross, and to kneel when the procession [of the host] passed by. The women dared not venture into the streets.... Some, who were with child, they compelled to swear to baptize their infants at the Romish church. “Children were carried off, the parents knew not whither, or how to recover them; and all this was done under the eyes of the king, who refused even to listen to the complaints of the injured. In the other parts of the country, the soldiers lived as they pleased; publicly told that the king had given the Huguenots up to them for pillage, they expelled the ministers, outraged their wives, and drove men and women to mass with blows and with curses.”[75] Such was the first essay of the _dragonnades_, which system was before long to be perfected and extended under the reign of Louis XIV. The indignation of the churches on the news of the persecutions in Béarn may be imagined. It was not this time the great lords of the party who cried for warlike measures. They saw too well that the Calvinists, doubly weakened by their internal dissensions and their defections, would not be able to make head against the king.