Francis’s death gave the crown to his next younger brother, Charles IX (1560-1574), who was but eleven years old. During the fourteen years of his reign Catherine de Medicis ruled, first as regent and later in fact though not in name. Her methods were tell-tale of her nature. She favored Protestants or Catholics as the moment demanded, she promised and did not fulfil, she deceived, she ordered assassination, she depraved the morals of her own children. All the time civil war went on, pausing now and again but never entirely ceasing. The most horrible event of the whole hideous contest was the massacre of the Protestants which took place on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572. Catherine had arranged that her daughter, Marguerite of Valois, should marry Henry, King of Navarre, the leader of the Protestants. Whether this was done in the hope of bringing the opposing parties together, or whether the queen-mother’s intention was to decoy as many prominent Huguenots as possible to Paris it is impossible to say. The fact that Henry’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret, died in Paris a few weeks before the wedding, probably from poison-saturated gloves, would seem to lend color to the latter theory. So suspicious of evil were the Huguenots that it is said that one-half of Henry of Navarre’s moustache turned white from fear when he saw two prominent Catholics talking together a little while before the wedding. Events proved that such suspicions were not groundless. The wedding was set for the seventeenth of August. On account of the difference between the religious belief of Henry and his bride, it took place in front of the cathedral in the Parvis or Paradise of Notre Dame. This was an open place raised above the level of the adjoining streets and railed from it. Marguerite was so unwilling to marry Henry that she refused her consent even up to the moment when the archbishop demanded it. Her brother, the king, met the emergency by seizing her head and bobbing it and the service went on as if she had answered a legitimate “I will.” After the marriage the bride heard mass in the cathedral while the bridegroom admired the bishop’s garden. Dinner followed at the bishop’s palace, and supper at the Louvre. On succeeding days there were balls, jousts, and masquerades. Four days later Admiral Coligny, the head of the Protestants, was attacked by a paid assassin but not killed. This piece of news was brought to Charles IX while he was playing tennis on one of the courts at the eastern end of the Louvre.