Phonics Museum Reader #30 (old)

This is the thirtieth of thirty-one readers used in the Veritas Press Phonics Museum program, designed for first grade.

Sample Section:

The Queen Mother of France threw the vase at the wall, and it broke into a spray of green pieces.

Her helpers ran from her room, and she shouted them back.

Story Background:

The recovery of the gospel in the Reformation had a special influence upon the royal courts of France. Faithful Protestants and zealous Roman Catholics struggled against one another in some of the leading families of France during the late 1500s. In the French feudal kingdom of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, the niece of one of the most powerful French kings, became devoted to the recovered gospel and used her territory as a refuge for French Protestant leaders and pastors. She corresponded with the reformer John Calvin and sought to raise her son Henry in faithfulness to the gospel.

But the young Roman Catholic boy Charles IX came to the French throne, and his mother Catherine de Medici ruled for him. Catherine was cunning and ruthless in her determination to keep the throne in Roman Catholic hands.

The story of this primer is an episode in 1567 when Catherine sought to seduce Jeanne's son Henry into her pleasure. Jeanne and Henry escaped for a time. But later, Catherine would propose a marriage between her own daughter and Jeanne's Henry, with the stated goal of bringing peace to France. When all the Huguenot leaders gathered in Paris for the wedding, Catherine and her son organized a massive massacre of Protestants (St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572). Jeanne d'Albret died just before that in Paris under suspicious circumstances and her son Henry went on to become the king of France, Henry IV. Though he offered more tolerance to the Huguenots, he did finally embrace Roman Catholicism in order to rule as king of France.