On which considerations, being then retired into his government of Champaigne, to which place he went after the conference at Nancy, he plied the king incessantly with messages sent by gentlemen, one after another, to urge him to a speedy and punctual answer. And this he did with the more eagerness and importunity, because, on the one side, he found himself more powerful than ever, having a great part of the gentry, and almost all the people, and especially the Parisians, for him; and, on the other side, he observed the party of the Huguenots to be very low, and infinitely weakened, by the defeat of their great German succours, and by their late loss of the Prince of Conde, a person of all others the most strictly tied to their religion, and on whom they more relied than any man, not excepting the King of Navarre himself. He deceased on the 5th of March, at St Jean de Angely, of an exceeding violent distemper, with which he was suddenly seized one evening after supper, and which carried him off in two days time. The sixteen, with infamous baseness, made a great rejoicing for it; and their preachers failed not to roar out in their sermons, that it was the effect of the excommunication, with which he had been thunderstruck by Pope Sixtus. But besides that the King of Navarre, who had been struck in the same manner by the bull, had his health never the worse for it, the king, to whom that poor creature the Cardinal of Bourbon had been telling the same story, and making wonderful exclamations in relating it, answered him with a smile, that it might very well be the occasion of his death, but withal there was something else which helped him on his journey. And truly the matter was put beyond all doubt, after the attestation of four physicians, and of two master chirurgeons, who deposed upon their oaths, that they had manifestly seen, in almost all the parts of his body, all the most evident signs and effects of a caustic poison, burning and ulcerating. A most execrable action, which could not be too rigorously punished; and yet the laws inflicted what was possible on the person of one of his domestic servants, who was drawn in pieces by four horses in the place of St Jean de Angely.