Montmorency had been released from two years of Spanish captivity under the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, by which time the Guises have supplanted him and the fifteen-year-old king Francis II treats him with indifference.

Montmorency has to give up his Great Master status to the Duke of Guise.

However, his son Henri is appointed marshal by way of indemnity.

He himself retires to his estates.

Francis II ‘s powerful Guise in-laws, who see an opportunity for power and an opportunity to destroy the Huguenots in France, dominate the weak-willed French monarch.

The ensuing persecution provokes the Huguenot Conspiracy of Amboise, a plot hatched by Louis de Bourbon, prince de Condé and Huguenot leader, to abduct Francis and arrest his Guise mentors.

Some Huguenots surround the Château d’Amboise in March 1560 and attempt to seize the King in an abortive coup d'etat, but the authorities, having discovered their plan, bloodily crush the incipient rebellion.

The failure of the prince de Condé’s so-called Conspiracy of Amboise has strengthened the power of the Guises, which has in turn frightened the Queen Mother.

Catherine attempts to balance the situation by securing the appointment of the moderate Michel de L'Hospital as chancellor, who summons the States General in the hopes of gaining peace and rehabilitating court finances.

Soon after the session begins at Orléans, Francis, a sickly and weak-willed young man, dies on December 5, 1560 after a reign of seventeen months.

His death temporarily ends the dominion of his wife’s Guise relatives, and saves Huguenot leader Condé, who had been sentenced to death for high treason.

François’ younger brother ascends the French throne as Charles IX.

Mary Stewart, widowed at eighteen and recently orphaned—her mother Marie de Guise had died at forty-five on June 11—and unwilling to stay in France and live under the domination of her mother-in-law, elects to return to Scotland and take her chances with the Protestant reformers.

France’s Bourbon dynasty, the direct line having died out in 1503 and the collateral Montpensier branch having become extinct in 1527, survives in the collateral line of the Vendôme, descending from Jacques de la Marche, constable of France in the mid-fourteenth century.

Antoine de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, titular king-consort of Navarre, is himself eight generations removed from Louis IX, father of the dynasty’s founder, Robert of Clermont, grandfather of Jacques de la Marche; the junior Bourbon line of Condé descends from Antoine's brother, Louis.

Antoine de Bourbon had temporarily allied himself with the Protestants but changes sides and is mortally wounded in battle against them at Rouen.

At Antoine’s death on October 26, 1562, the Bourbon line continues in nine-year-old Henri de Navarre, or de Bourbon, the son of Antoine and Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre from 1555.

Prince Henry, who spent most of his early childhood in the Béarnaise city of Pau, had gone to live with his second cousins, the children of the king of France and Catherine de Médici, in 1561.

His mother, meanwhile, had announced her Calvinism in 1560.

The Edict of Amboise, the result of the truce negotiated in 1563 by Catherine de' Medici, is generally regarded as unsatisfactory by all concerned, the Catholics in particular being uneasy about what they regard as unwise concessions to the heretics.

The political temperature of the surrounding lands is rising, as unrest grows in the Netherlands.

The Huguenots become suspicious of Spanish intentions when the latter reinforce their strategic corridor from Italy north along the Rhine.

Huguenot leaders Louis, prince de Condé, and Gaspard de Coligny, Seigneur de Chatillón and admiral of France, fearing an international Roman Catholic conspiracy, and hoping to seize the person of the king and remove him from Guise influence, mount an unsuccessful attempt to capture the royal family at Meaux.

This provokes a further outburst of hostilities.

Tensions between French Catholics and Huguenots are again on the boil as a Huguenot force advances on Paris in the autumn of 1567.

French Catholic political and military leader Anne, duc de Montmorency, now in his mid-seventies, dies on November 12, 1567 from multiple wounds received in the battle of Saint-Denis, near Paris, in this Second War of Religion between French Huguenots and Roman Catholics.

Montmorency’s opposite number on the Huguenot side, Prince Louis de Condé, sustains his position despite numerical odds.

The Peace of Longjumeau, a result of the inconclusive battle of St. Denis, ends the Second War of Religion in March 1568 and extends additional concessions to the Huguenots, but is again unsatisfactory to both sides.

French admiral Gaspard de Coligny and Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, both prominent Huguenot leaders, form a loose alliance with the Prince of Orange, who has begun to direct counteroffensives against the imperial Spanish forces in the Netherlands.

The Roman Catholic Guise family meanwhile increases its involvement with Spain.

Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, regards the recently deposed Mary Stewart as a tool for unseating her cousin, England’s childless Queen Elizabeth, and installing a Catholic monarch on that throne.

Condé and Coligny are the targets of a plot hatched in 1568 by Lorraine.

Escaping to the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle, the two leaders raise another army to wage what will be called the Third War of Religion, which breaks out in September.

Queen Mother Catherine de' Medici and her son King Charles decide to throw in their lot with the Guises.

Religious toleration is once more at an end.