For such an undertaking as this, however, it was obvious that a messenger must be found at once faithful, expert, and courageous; and such an one offered himself in the person of La Varenne, who without a moment's hesitation offered his services to the King, and acquitted himself so dexterously of his self-imposed task that he succeeded, not only in procuring two interviews with the Spanish Council, but even an audience of Philip, without once exciting suspicion; and his arrival at Madrid had been so well timed that although a second courier was despatched in all haste by the League, to announce the capture of his predecessor, he was enabled to effect his return to France with the reply of the Spanish monarch, by which Henry and his ministers were apprised of the plans and pretensions of that potentate (Amelot de la Houssaye, _Lettres du Cardinal d'Ossat_, vol.
ii.p.17 _note_.) La Varenne was subsequently Master-General of the Post Office.
[280] Philippe de Mornay, Seigneur de Plessis-Marly, Governor of Saumur, was born in the year 1549, at Bussy, in the department of the Oise, of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother (Francoise du Bec), the latter of whom educated him in the reformed faith.

Having escaped the massacre of St.Bartholomew, he visited Germany, Italy, and England, and finally entered the service of Henri IV, while he was still King of Navarre, who sent him on a mission to Queen Elizabeth.

His science, his valour, and his high sense of honour, rendered him after the abjuration of the monarch the chief of the Protestant party, and caused him to be called _the Huguenot Pope_.

He sustained against Duperron, Bishop of Evreux, the famous conference of Fontainebleau, at whose close each of the two parties claimed the victory.

Louis XIII deprived him of his government of Saumur; and he died in 1623.