to place himself at the head of the movement, is a question which is never likely to be satisfactorily answered. It is sufficient that he was almost universally identified with that mysterious personage at the time, and that this belief came near to costing him his life. Although permitted, after his indignant denial of the charge, to withdraw from Court, he and the King of Navarre, notwithstanding the entreaties of the Princesse de Condé, most imprudently resolved to obey the summons of François II. to the States-General at Orléans. It was to place his head in the lion’s mouth, for in the interval fresh evidence, or what might pass for evidence, against him had been obtained, and the Guises were resolved on his destruction. On 30 October, 1560, the two princes arrived at Orléans. The King received them with ominous coldness, and, as Condé was leaving the apartments of the Queen-Mother, where the audience had taken place, he was arrested, and conducted to a house near the convent of the Jacobins, which was immediately barred up, surrounded by soldiers, and transformed into a veritable Bastille. His wife, who, on learning of his arrest, had hastened to Orléans, was refused permission to see him; his attendants were withdrawn, and he was kept in the most absolute solitude. Catherine de’ Medici, who at this time possessed little or no power, and had been compelled, from the instinct of self-preservation, to cling to the Guises, pretended to approve of what had been done, and replied to all who besought her not to allow the prince to be brought to trial. “It is my son’s will.” She confined her efforts to saving the King of Navarre, who was merely kept under surveillance in his apartments. Although, as a Prince of the Blood, it was Condé’s undoubted privilege to be tried by the Grande Chambre of the Parlement in Paris, in which the princes and peers sat, the King entrusted his examination to a commission of judges presided over by Christophe de Thou, First President of the Parlement. Condé denied the competency of this tribunal, and “appealed from the King ill-advised to the King better-advised.” But his imprudence in accepting the services of two advocates gave a semblance of legality to the proceedings, and his appeals and protests having been overruled by the Privy Council, in which such was the fear inspired by the Guises that no one dared to utter a word in his defence, on 26 November, he was sentenced “to lose his head on the scaffold.”