At the head of “the League” was the Duke of Guise, the hero of the violent among the Roman Catholics, whom they desired to make king, instead of the worthless and despised Henry. At length, in the year 1585, the king, finding no other way of saving himself from the imminent peril which threatened him, made peace with the duke at the expense of the Reformers, and issued a decree, prohibiting the future exercise of the Reformed worship, and commanding all its adherents to abjure, or emigrate immediately, on pain of death and confiscation. This was no miserable court quarrel; it affected the interests of all, and touched the liberty, faith, fortune, and life of every man. So rigorously was the edict carried out, that the petition of a few poor women, who begged permission to dwell with their children in any remote corner of the kingdom, was refused. The most they could obtain was a safe conduct to England. Flight was out of the question for Palissy; and he remained at the mercy of men who respected neither age, virtue, nor misfortune. That he had friends who would gladly have protected him was known; nay, the king himself would willingly have sheltered one who had so long and skilfully served his mother. But the protection of the court was now unavailing; and the venerable man was sent to the Bastile. Four years of life yet remained to Bernard; all spent within the walls of his prison-house. There, in communion with God and his own soul, he passed the residue of his days, shut out from the eye of man, within that gloomy fabric, the very thought of which inspires one’s soul with shrinking horror. Profound secrecy and mystery were among the most prominent features in the management of the Bastile, and he who was retained there to waste away life within its damp and dismal cells, was sedulously kept from all knowledge of what was passing in the busy world without, while no tidings of him were ever permitted to reach the ears of his kindred and former companions.