It is to a very large extent through its history that Bayonne makes many appeals to the visitor, and particularly to the Englishman, for it is the capital of the country of that remarkable people the Basques. It stands on a noble river, with a magnificent mountainous country to the south, contrasted with the level wastes of Les Landes to the north, and its history as a possession of England almost to the beginning of the Renaissance, and as the centre of Wellington’s victories preceding Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, is of thrilling interest. Bayonne was included in the vast possessions of the Dukes of Aquitaine, and it passed with them into the hands of England for three centuries. The rule of the English kings was considerate, and Bayonne and Bordeaux prospered through their extensive exports of wine to England. Bayonne, in fact, reached its greatest prosperity while it was an English possession. Towards the end of the fourteenth century the mouth of the Adour became completely blocked with a bank of sand and shingle, and the river’s course was diverted to the north, so that it entered the sea ten miles from Bayonne. This was a disaster to the town, and it was not until two centuries later, in the year 1579, that the engineer-architect Louis de Foix, aided by a great gale, succeeded in reopening the old mouth, and restoring the river to its earlier course. The English lost Bayonne in 1451, when they were shorn of all their possessions in France except Calais. In 1526, when François I. was released from his palatial prison in Madrid, he rejoined his Court at Bayonne, and announced his intention of eluding the treaty which gave Burgundy to the Emperor Charles V. An interesting meeting took place in 1565, when Charles IX., with his mother, Catherine de Medici, met his sister Elizabeth, the Queen of Philip II. of Spain. It was for a long while thought that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was decided upon on this occasion, but modern historians are inclined to think otherwise. Coming down to Napoleonic times, the year 1814 brings Bayonne into the centre of the latter phase of the Peninsular War.