Faced with the prospect of a Protestant king, Catholic nobles gathered at Nancy in December 1584, and the League drew up a treaty with Philip II's ambassadors at Joinville.

[7] By this time "the League in Paris had fallen from its first ideals into mere partisanship",[8] and the Duke of Guise increasingly used it not only to defend the Catholic cause, but as a political tool in an attempt to usurp the French throne.

The League also opposed the pragmatic French jurists and intellectuals known as Politiques, who recoiled from the murderous sectarian loathing and sought a strong monarchy to rise above religious differences.

Faced with this mounting opposition, the King canceled the Peace of La Rochelle, re-criminalizing Protestantism and beginning a new chapter in the French Wars of Religion.

On the Day of the Barricades, Henry III was forced to flee Paris, leaving Guise as de facto ruler of France.

On 1 August 1589, as the two Henrys sat before the city preparing for their final assault, Jacques Clément, a Dominican lay brother with ties to the League and enraged by the killing of the Duke, infiltrated the King's entourage dressed as a priest, and assassinated him.

The Catholic jurist and poet Jean de La Ceppède, a Politique supporter of Henry of Navarre, was arrested in 1589 when Aix-en-Provence fell to the League's armies.

The last remaining senior leader of the League was Philippe Emmanuel, Duke of Mercœur, who, with Spanish backing, was also fighting to restore the political independence of the Duchy of Brittany under his own rule.

King Henry IV then assured his dynasty's future inheritance of Brittany by arranging the marriage of his illegitimate son, César Duc de Vendôme, to Mercœur's daughter Francoise.

While political and social pressures were doubtless present, and even significant in the case of the Sixteen in Paris, to focus on these factors exclusively overlooks a very different face of the League.

New religious orders and confraternities were founded in League towns, and the gulf separating laity and clergy was often bridged as clerics joined aldermen in the Hotel de Ville where both became the epitome of goodly magistrates.