The union of the Huguenots and the Politiques made them very strong, especially in the south. But on the other hand the duke of Guise received much assistance from Flanders. When the successor of Alva, Requesens, learned of the death of Charles IX, he had offered the aid of Spanish troops to Catherine de Medici.[1685] Although the proffer was declined, the practical result was the same, for owing to lack of pay in the Low Countries, thousands of reiters and Walloon and German footmen flocked across the border in the summer and autumn, where they were welcomed by the duke of Guise, who, somewhere and somehow, found the means to pay them.[1686] But below the stratum of professional soldiers in France there was another class in arms which feudal society was not used to see in such a capacity. This was the people; not town militia, for town and provincial leagues had made men familiar with them, but the peasantry. The protracted wars by economically ruining and morally debauching this class had generated a breed of men who sprang from the soil like the dragon’s teeth of Greek fable, men who by observation and practice were used to the matchlock and the sword, brutalized by oppression, long made desperate by burdensome taxes and the wrongs of war.[1687] [Illustration: PIKEMAN AND COLOR-BEARER (Tortorel and Perissin)] The weariness of vigil in the depth of winter and overconfidence seem to have relaxed the alertness of Henry III’s foes. At any rate, having extorted 50,000 francs from the noblemen and gentlemen in his train in order to pay the soldiery around him, the King, raising the siege of Livron on January 24, 1575, managed to slip through the defiles to Rheims for his coronation. The coronation was a triumph of the Guises. For far from being set back by the death of the cardinal of Lorraine on December 29, at Avignon[1688] their star seemed to be higher than before. The cardinal of Guise took the place of his deceased uncle as primate of Rheims; the duke of Guise was grand chamberlain; and the duke of Mayenne and the marquis d’Elbœuf were the chief lay peers. The sole outsider was De Retz who officiated as constable for the occasion. The crowning took place on February 15. Shortly after the event, apparently in a sudden whim of passion, Henry III married Louise de Vaudmont, whose father was uncle of the duke of Lorraine and whose mother had been sister of the unfortunate Egmont. But the marriage was without political significance—indeed the new queen was of so little station that Catherine de Medici, in a letter to Queen Elizabeth, expressed her humiliation at her son’s marriage.[1689] [Illustration: ARQUEBUSIER (Tortorel and Perissin)]