Charles himself, favorable at Bayonne, became embittered against the reformers, as White himself states, by what he saw as he returned through the states of the Queen of Navarre, who had, with relentless fury, extirpated Catholicity from her territory.
The pacification could not restore peace to the excited public mind while the two antagonistic parties stood face to face. The favor shown to Condé after he joined in expelling his English allies from Havre, as well as to Coligny, whom Montmorency summoned to garrison Paris, emboldened the reformers. The remaining Catholic churches began to undergo the terrible profanation that visited so many, and with this came retaliation. The Protestant princes in Germany at this time appealed to Charles to show lenity to their fellow-believers in his kingdom. The French monarch rebuked their intermeddling, and added, "I might also pray them to permit the Catholics to worship freely in their own cities." And White admits that the Catholics there fared no better than the Huguenots in France.
Meanwhile the Huguenot party was preparing for a new effort to obtain complete control. A force raised to watch the Spanish movements in the Low Countries was made the pretext. A plot was formed to seize the king and his mother, and Coligny, to blind the court, remained superintending his vineyards. But on the 28th of September, 1567, all France was in flames. Fifty towns were seized, and a strong force of Huguenot cavalry dashed upon Meaux to seize the king. Charles, nearly entrapped by the specious L'Hopital, reached Paris, protected by a body of gentlemen under the Duke de Nemours, but Condé pressed so close that Charles more than once turned on his pursuers, and fought at the head of his little body-guard.
As before, the Catholics were without union or plan, while the Huguenots were an organized body of secret conspirators, acting on a well-concerted plan.
Protestant allegiance to a Catholic monarch has never been very strong; indeed, it seems simply a creature of circumstance, not a matter of obligation. The attempt to set aside a Catholic sovereign after the death of Edward VI. and of Charles II. has never been treated as a crime. In the same spirit, White sees nothing wrong in Condé except failure: "His failure (to seize the king's person) made him a traitor as well as a rebel." And yet, with that strange perversity of ideas that seems inherent in his school, he at once brands the Cardinal of Lorraine as a traitor for inviting in the King of Spain, as Condé had Elizabeth.