The Prince proceeded on his march, during which the heavy news had been brought to him, but he felt convinced that, with the very arrival of the awful tidings, the fate of that campaign was sealed, and the fall of Mons inevitable. In his own language, he had been struck to the earth "with the blow of a sledge-hammer,"--nor did the enemy draw a different augury from the great event. The crime was not committed with the connivance of the Spanish government. On the contrary, the two courts were at the moment bitterly hostile to each other. In the beginning of the summer, Charles IX. and his advisers were as false to Philip, as at the end of it they were treacherous to Coligny and Orange. The massacre of the Huguenots had not even the merit of being a well-contrived and intelligently executed scheme. We have seen how steadily, seven years before, Catharine de Medici had rejected the advances of Alva towards the arrangement of a general plan for the extermination of all heretics within France and the Netherlands at the same moment. We have seen the disgust with which Alva turned from the wretched young King at Bayonne, when he expressed the opinion that to take arms against his own subjects was wholly out of the question, and could only be followed by general ruin. "'Tis easy to see that he has been tutored," wrote Alva to his master. Unfortunately, the same mother; who had then instilled those lessons of hypocritical benevolence, had now wrought upon her son's cowardly but ferocious nature with a far different intent. The incomplete assassination of Coligny, the dread of signal vengeance at the hands of the Huguenots, the necessity of taking the lead in the internecine snuggle; were employed with Medicean art, and with entire success. The King was lashed into a frenzy. Starting to his feet, with a howl of rage and terror, "I agree to the scheme," he cried, "provided not one Huguenot be left alive in France to reproach me with the deed." That night the slaughter commenced. The long premeditated crime was executed in a panic, but the work was thoroughly done. The King, who a few days before had written with his own hand to Louis of Nassau, expressing his firm determination to sustain the Protestant cause both in France and the Netherlands, who had employed the counsels of Coligny in the arrangement, of his plans, and who had sent French troops, under Genlis and La None, to assist their Calvinist brethren in Flanders, now gave the signal for the general massacre of the Protestants, and with his own hands, from his own palace windows, shot his subjects with his arquebuss as if they had been wild beasts.