Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

THE FORTUNES OF A KNIGHTLY FAMILY.

“This deals with nobler knights and monarchs,

Full of great fears, great hopes, great enterprises.”

Antony Brewer, “Lingua.”

In the pleasant spring-time of the year 1506, a little boy, mounted on a mule, and accompanied by a serving man on foot, crossed over the frontier from Lorraine into France. The boy was a pretty child, some ten years old. He was soberly clad, but a merry heart beat under his gray jerkin; and his spirits were as light as the feather in his bonnet. The servant who walked at his side was a simple yet faithful follower of his house; but there was no more speculation in his face than there was in that of the mule. Nothing could have looked more harmless and innocent than the trio in question; and yet the whole—joyous child, plodding servitor, and the mule whose bells rang music as he trod—formed one of the most remarkable invasions of which the kingdom of France has ever been the victim.

The boy was the fifth child of René and Philippa de Gueldres, the ducal sovereigns of Lorraine. This duchy, a portion of the old kingdom of Lotharingia—in disputes for the possession of which the children of Charlemagne had shed rivers of blood—had maintained its independence, despite the repeated attempts of Germany and France to reduce it to subjection. At the opening of the sixteenth century, it had seen a legal succession of sovereign and independent masters during seven centuries. The reigning duke was René, the second of that name. He had acquired estates in France, and he had inherited the hatred of Lorraine to the Capetian race which had dethroned the heirs of Charlemagne. It was for this double reason that he unostentatiously sent into the kingdom of France one of his sons, a boy of fair promise. The mission of the yet unconscious child was to increase the territorial possessions of his family within the French dominions, and ultimately to rule both Church and State—if not from the throne, why then from behind it.

The merry boy proved himself in course of time to be no unfitting instrument for this especial purpose. He was brought up at the French court, studied chivalry, and practised passages of arms with French knights; was the first up at réveillée, the last at a feast, the most devout at mass, and the most winning in ladies’ bower. The princes of the blood loved him, and so did the princesses. The army hailed him with delight; and the church beheld in him and his brother, Cardinal John, two of those champions whom it records with gladness, and canonizes with alacrity.

Such was Claude of Lorraine, who won the heart and lands of Antoinette de Bourbon, and who received from Francis I. not only letters of naturalization, but the title of Duke of Guise. The locality so named is in Picardy. It had fallen to the house of Lorraine by marriage, and the dignity of Count which accompanied it was now changed for that of Duke. It was not long before Claude made the title famous. The sword of Guise was never from his grasp, and its point was unceasingly directed against the enemies of his new country. He shed his own blood, and spilled that of others, with a ferocious joy. Francis saw in him the warmest of his friends and the bravest of his soldiers. His bravery helped to the glory that was reaped at Marignan, at Fontarabia, and in Picardy. Against internal revolt or foreign invasion he was equally irresistible. His sword drove back the Imperialists of Germany within their own frontier; and when on the night of Pavia the warriors of France sat weeping like girls amid the wide ruin around them, his heart alone throbbed with hopeful impulses, and his mind only was filled with bright visions of victories to come.

These came indeed, but they were sometimes triumphs that earned for him an immortality of infamy. The crest of his house was a double cross, and this device, though it was no emblem of the intensity of religion felt by these who bore it, was significant of the double sanguinary zeal of the family—a zeal employed solely for selfish ends. The apostolic reformers of France were, at this period, in a position of some power. Their preachers were in the pulpit, and their people in the field. They heard the gospel leaning on their swords; and, the discourse done, they rushed bravely into battle to defend what they had heard.

Against these pious but strong-limbed confederates the wrath of Guise was something terrible. It did not, like that of Francis I.—who banqueted one day the unorthodox friends whom he burned the next—alternate with fits of mercy. It raged without intermission, and before it the Reformers of Alsatia were swept as before a blast in whose hot breath was death. He spared neither sex nor age; and he justified his bloody deeds by blasphemously asserting that he was guided to them by the light of a cross which blazed before him in the heavens. The church honored him with the name of “good and faithful servant;” but there are Christian hearths in Alsatia where he is still whisperingly spoken of as “the accursed butcher.”

When his own fingers began to hold less firmly the handle of his sword, he also began to look among his children for those who were most likely to carry out the mission of his house. His eye marked, approvingly, the bearing of his eldest son Francis, Count D’Aumale; and had no less satisfaction in the brothers of Francis, who, whether as soldiers or priests, were equally ready to further the interests of Lorraine, and call them those of Heaven. His daughter Mary he gave to James V. of Scotland; and the bride brought destruction for her dowry. Upon himself and his children, Francis I., and subsequently Henry II., looked at last with mingled admiration and dread. Honors and wealth were lavished upon them with a prodigal and even treasonable liberality. The generous king gave to the insatiate Guise the property of the people; and when these complained somewhat menacingly, Guise achieved some new exploit, the public roar of applause for which sanctioned a quiet enjoyment of his ill-gotten treasures.

For the purpose of such enjoyment he retired to his castle at Joinville. The residence was less a palace than a monastery. It was inhabited by sunless gloom and a deserted wife. The neglected garden was trimmed at the coming of the duke, but not for his sake nor for that of the faithful Antoinette. Before the eyes of that faithful wife he built a bower for a mistress who daily degraded with blows the hero of a hundred stricken fields. He deprecated the rough usage of the courtesan with tears and gold; and yet he had no better homage for the virtuous mother of his children, than a cold civility. His almost sudden death in 1550 was accounted for as being the effect of poison, administered at the suggestion of those to whom his growing greatness was offensive. The accusation was boldly graven on his monument; and it is probably true. No one however, profited by the crime.

The throne found in his children more dangerous supporters than he had ever been himself; and the people paid for their popular admiration with loss of life and liberty. The church, however, exulted; for Claude of Lorraine, first Duke of Guise, gave to it the legitimate son, Cardinal Charles, who devised the massacre of the day of St. Bartholomew; and the illegitimate son, the Abbé de Cluny, who, on that terrible day, made his dagger drink the blood of the Huguenots, till the wielder of it became as drunk with frenzy as he was wont to be with the fiery wine which was his peculiar and intense delight.

The first Duke of Guise only laid a foundation, upon which he left his heirs and successors to build at their discretion. He had, nevertheless, effected much. He had gained for his family considerable wealth; and if he had not also obtained a crown, he had acquired possession of rich crown-lands. The bestowing upon him of these earned popular execration for the king; the people, at the same time, confessed that the services of Guise were worthy of no meaner reward. When King Francis saw that he was blamed for bestowing what the recipient was deemed worthy of having granted to him, we can hardly wonder that Francis, while acknowledging the merits of the aspiring family, bade the members of his own to be on their guard against the designs of every child of the house of Lorraine.

But he was no child who now succeeded to the honors of his father, the first duke. Francis of Guise, at his elevation to the ducal title, saw before him two obstacles to further greatness. One was a weak king, Henry II.; and the other, a powerful favorite, the Constable de Montmorency, from whose family, it was popularly said, had sprung the first Christian within the realm of France. Francis speedily disposed of the favorite, and almost as speedily raised himself to the vacant office, which he exercised so as to further his remote purposes. In the meantime the king was taught to believe that his crown and happiness were dependent on his Lorraine cousins, who, on their side, were not only aiming at the throne of France for one member of the house, but were aspiring to the tiara for a second; the crown of Naples for a third—to influence in Flanders and in Spain, and even to the diadem of Elizabeth of England, succession to which was recognised as existing in them, by Mary Stuart, in case of her own decease without direct heirs. It is said that the British Romanists looked forward with unctuous complacency to the period when the sceptre of this island should fall into the blood-stained grasp of a “Catholic Guise.”

It was not only the fortune of Francis to repair the ill luck encountered in the field by Montmorency, but to gain advantages in fight, such as France had not yet seen. The Emperor Charles V. had well-nigh got possession of beleaguered Metz, when Guise threw himself into the place, rescued it from the Emperor, and swept the Imperialists out of France. His fiery wrath cooled only in presence of the wounded, to whom he behaved with gentle and helping courtesy. His gigantic labors here brought on an attack of fever; and when he was compelled to seek rest in his house at Marchez, a host of priests and cardinals of his family gathered round his court, and excited him to laughter by rough games that suited but sorrily with their calling.

The second duke inherited his father’s hatred for “heretics.” The great Colligny had been his bosom friend; but when that renowned Reformer gave evidence of his new opinions upon religious subjects, then ensued, first a coldness, then fits of angry quarrelling, and at last a duel, in which, though neither combatant was even scratched, friendship was slain for ever. Duke Francis was prodigal like his father, but then his brother, Cardinal Charles, was minister of the finances: and the king and his mistress, Diana de Poictiers, cared not how the revenue was managed, so that money was forthcoming when necessity pressed. The consequence was, that the king’s exchequer was robbed to supply the extravagances of Guise. But then men began to associate with the name the idea of deliverance from oppression; and they did not count the cost. And yet victory did not invariably select for her throne the glittering helm of the aspiring duke. The pope had selected him as commander of the papal army acting against Naples, but intrigue paralyzed the arm which had never before been conquered, and the pontiff showered epigrams upon him instead of laurels.

In this momentary eclipse of the sun of his glory, the duke placed his own neck under the papal heel. He served in the pope’s chapel as an Acolyte, meekly bore the mantle of obese and sneering cardinals, and exhibited a humility which was not without success. When at a banquet given by a cardinal, Guise humbly sat down at the lower end of the table, he asked a French officer who was endeavoring to thrust in below him, “Why comest thou here, friend?” “That it might not be said,” answered the soldier, “that the representative of the King of France took the very lowest place at a priest’s table!”

From such reproaches Guise gladly fled, to buckle on his armor and drive back an invasion of France by the Hispano-Flemings on the north. The services he now rendered his country made the people almost forget the infamy of their king, who was wasting life in his capital, and the oppressive imposts of the financial cardinal, whom the sufferers punningly designated as Cardinal La Ruine. The ruin he achieved was forgiven in consideration of the glory accomplished by his brother, who had defeated and destroyed the armies which threatened the capital from the north; and who had effected much greater glory by suddenly falling on Calais with a force of ten to one, and tearing from the English the last of the conquests till then held by them in France. Old Lord Wentworth, the governor, plied his artillery with a roar that was heard on the English coast: but the roar was all in vain. There was a proverb among our neighbors, and applied by them to every individual of mediocre qualifications, that “he was not the sort of man to drive the English out of France.” That man was found in Guise; and the capital began naturally to contrast him with the heartless king, who sat at the feet of a concubine, and recked little of the national honor or disgrace. And yet, the medals struck to commemorate the recovery of Calais bear the names only of Henri and Diana. They omit all mention of the great liberator, Guise!

The faults of Henri, however, are not to be entirely attributed to himself. He had some feelings of compassion for the wretched but stout-hearted Huguenots, with whom, in the absence of Guise, he entered into treaties, which, Guise present, he was constrained to violate! In pursuit of the visions of dominion in France, and of the tiara at Rome, the ambitious house sought only to gain the suffrages of the church and the faithful. To win smiles from them, the public scaffolds were deluged with the blood of heretics; and all were deemed so who refused to doff their caps to the images of the virgin, raised in the highways at the suggestion of the duke and the cardinal. This terrific persecution begat remonstrance; but when remonstrance was treated as if it were rebellion, rebellion followed thereupon; as, perhaps, was hoped for; and the swords of the Guisards went flashing over every district in France, dealing death wherever dwelt the alleged enemies of God, who dared to commune with Him according to conscience, rather than according to Rome. Congregations, as at Vassi, were set upon and slaughtered in cold blood, without resistance. In the Huguenot “temple” of this last place was found a Bible. It was brought to the duke. This noble gentleman could spell no better than the great Duke of Marlborough; and Guise was, moreover, worse instructed in the faith which he professed. He looked into the Book of Life, unconscious of what he held, and with a wondering exclamation as to what it might be all about, he flung it aside, and turned to the further slaughter of those who believed therein.

In such action he saw his peculiar mission for the moment, but he was not allowed to pursue it unopposed. His intrigues and his cruelties made rebels even of the princes of the blood; and Condé took the field to revenge their wrongs, as well as those of the Reformers. The issue was tried on the bloody day at Dreux, when the setting sun went down on a Protestant army routed, and on Condé a captive; but sharing the bed, as was the custom of the time, of his proved victor Guise. Never did two more deadly enemies lie on the same couch, sleepless, and full of mutual suspicion. But the hatred of Condé was a loyal hatred; that of Guise was marked by treacherous malignity. The Protestant party, in presence of that hot fury, seemed to melt away like a snow-wraith in the sun. He and his Guisards were the terror of the so-called enemies of the Faith. Those whom he could not reach by the sword, he struck down by wielding against them the helpless hand of the king, who obeyed with the passiveness of a Marionette, and raised stakes, and fired the pile, and gave the victim thereto, simply because Guise would so have it.

The duke received one portion at least of his coveted reward. At every massacre of inoffensive Protestants, the Catholic pulpits resounded with biblical names, showered down upon him by the exulting preachers. When his banner had swept triumphantly over successive fields, whose after-crops were made rich by heretical blood, then did the church pronounce him to be a soldier divinely armed, who had at length “consecrated his hands, and avenged the quarrel of the Lord.”

Guise lived, it is true, at a period when nothing was held so cheap as life. Acts of cruelty were but too common in all factions. If he delivered whole towns to pillage and its attendant horrors, compared with which death were merciful, he would himself exhibit compassion, based on impulse or caprice. He was heroic, according to the thinking of his age, which considered heroism as being constituted solely of unflinching courage. In all other respects, the duke, great as he was, was as mean as the veriest knave who trailed a pike in his own bands. Scarcely a letter addressed to his officers reached them without having been previously read to their right worshipful master. There was scarcely a mansion in the kingdom, whose lord was a man of influence, but that at that table and the hearth there sat a guest who was the paid spy of Francis of Guise.

It is hardly necessary to add that his morality generally was on a par with the particular specimens we have given of it. Crowds of courtesans accompanied him to the camp, while he deliberately exposed his own wife, Anne of Este, the sister of Tasso’s Leonora, to the insulting homage of a worthless king. Emphatically may it be said that the truth was not in him. He gloried in mendacity. No other personage that I can call to mind ever equalled him in lying—except, perhaps, those very highly professing heroes who swagger in Greek tragedy. He procured, by a lie, the capital conviction of Condé. The latter escaped the penalty, and taxed the duke with his falsehood. Guise swore by his sword, his life, his honor, his very soul, that he was innocent of the charge. Condé looked on the ducal liar with a withering contempt, and turned from him with a sarcasm that should have pierced him like a sword. Pointed as it was, it could not find way through his corslet to his heart. He met it with a jest, and deemed the sin unregistered.

There was a watchful public, nevertheless, observing the progress made toward greatness by the chivalric duke, and his brother the cardinal. Henry II. had just received the mortal blow dealt him at a tournament by the lance of Montgomery. Francis II., his brother, the husband of Mary Stuart, and therewith nephew to Guise, succeeded to the uneasy throne and painful privileges of Henri. On the night of this monarch’s decease, two courtiers were traversing a gallery of the Louvre. “This night,” said one, “is the eve of the Festival of the Three Kings.” “How mean you by that?” asked the other with a smile. “I mean,” rejoined the first, “that to-morrow we shall have three monarchs in Paris—one of them, King of France; the others Kings in France—from Lorraine.”

Under the latter two, Duke and Cardinal, was played out the second act of the great political drama of Lorraine. It was altogether a melo-drama, in which there was abundance of light and shadow. At times, we find the hero exhibiting exemplary candor; anon, he is the dark plotter, or the fierce and open slayer of his kind. There are stirring scenes of fights, wherein his adversaries draw their swords against him, at the instigation of a disgusted King, who no sooner saw Guise triumphant, than he devoted to death the survivors whom he had clandestinely urged into the fray.

The battles were fought, on one side, for liberty of conscience; on the other, for the sake of universal despotism. The bad side triumphed during a long season; and field after field saw waving over it the green banner of Lorraine. Catherine de Medicis, and her son Charles IX., accompanied the Duke in more than one struggle, after the short-lived reign of Francis II. had come to an end. They passed, side by side, through the breach at Rouen; but accident divided them at Orleans, where had assembled the gallant few who refused to despair for the Protestant cause.

Guise beleaguered the city, and was menacingly furious at its obstinacy in holding out. One evening he had ridden with his staff to gaze more nearly at the walls, from behind which defiance was flung at him. “You will never be able to get in,” remarked roughly a too presuming official. “Mark me!” roared the chafed Duke, “yon setting sun will know to-morrow how to get behind that rampart; and by Heaven, so will I!” He turned his horse, and galloped back alone to his quarters. He was encountered on his way by a Huguenot officer, Poltrot de la Mer, who brought him down by a pistol-shot. The eyes of the dying Duke, as he lay upon the ground, met for the last time the faint rays of that departing sun, with which he had sworn to be up and doing on the morrow. He died in his hut. His condition was one of extreme “comfortableness.” He had robbed the King’s exchequer to gratify his own passions;—and he thanked Heaven that he had been a faithful subject to his sovereign! He had been notoriously unfaithful to a noble and virtuous wife; and he impressed upon her with his faltering lips, the assurance that “generally speaking” his infidelity as a husband did not amount to much worth mentioning! He confessed to, and was shriven by his two brothers, Cardinals John and Charles. The former was a greater man than the Duke. The latter was known in his own times and all succeeding, as “the bottle cardinal,” a name of which he was only not ashamed, but his title to which he was ever ostentatiously desirous to vindicate and establish.

The first Duke had acquired possession of crown-lands; the second had at his disposal the public treasure; and the third hoped to add to the acquisitions of his family the much-coveted sceptre of the Kings of France.

Henri, surnamed Le Balafré, or “the scarred,” succeeded his father in the year 1560. During the greater portion of his subsequent life, his two principal objects were the destruction of Protestantism, and the possession of the King’s person. He therewith flattered the national vanity by declaring that the natural limits of France, on two sides, were the Rhine and the Danube—an extension of frontier which was never effected, except temporarily, in the latter days of Napoleon. But the declaration entailed a popularity on the Duke which was only increased by his victory at Jarnac, when the French Protestants not only suffered defeat, but lost their leader, the brave and unfortunate Condé. This gallant chief had surrendered, but he was basely murdered by a pistol-shot, and his dead body, flung across an ass, was paraded through the ranks of the victors, as a trophy. How far the Duke was an accomplice in the crime, is not determined. That such incidents were deemed lightly of by him, is sufficiently clear by his own proclamation in seven languages, wherein he accused Coligny as the instigator of the murder of the late Duke of Guise, and set a price upon that noble head, to be won by any assassin.

For that so-called murder, Guise had his revenge on the day of St. Bartholomew, when he vainly hoped that the enemies of his house had perished for ever. On the head of more than one member of the house of Guise rests the responsibility of that terrible day. During the slaughter, Guise gained his revenge, but lost his love. The cries of the victims were the nuptial songs chanted at the marriage-ceremony of Henri of Navarre and Margaret, the King’s sister. The latter had looked, nothing loath, upon the suit offered to her by Guise, who was an ardent wooer. But the wooing had been roughly broken in upon by the lady’s brother, the Duc d’Anjou, who declared aloud in the Louvre, that if Guise dared look with lover’s eyes upon “Margot,” he would run his knife into the lover’s throat! The threat had its influence, and the unfaithful wooer, who had been all the while solemnly affianced to a Princess Catherine of Cleves, married that remarkable brunette, and showed his respect for her, by speaking and writing of her as “that amiable lady, the negress.” It may be noticed in passing, that the objection of D’Anjou to Guise as a brother-in-law, was not personal; it had a political foundation. The two dukes became, indeed, brothers-in-law; not by Guise marrying the sister of D’Anjou, but by D’Anjou marrying the sister of Guise, and by sharing with her the throne which he, subsequently, occupied rather than enjoyed, as Henri III.

When summoned to the throne by the unedifying death of Charles IX., Henry of Anjou was king of Poland. He escaped from that country with difficulty, in order to wear a more brilliant but a more fatal crown in France. He had no sooner assumed it, when he beheld the Guises encircling him, and leaving him neither liberty nor will. The Protestants were driven into rebellion. They found a leader in Henry of Navarre, and Guise and his friends made war against them, irrespective of the King’s consent, and cut in pieces, with their swords, the treaties entered into between the two Henrys, without the consent of the third Henri—of Guise and Lorraine. The latter so completely enslaved the weak and unhappy sovereign, as to wring from him, against his remonstrance and conviction, the famous articles of Nemours, wherein it was solemnly decreed in the name of the King, and confirmed by the signature of Guise, that, thenceforward, it was the will of God that there should be but one faith in France, and that the opposers thereof would find that opposition incurred death.

There is a tradition that when Henri III. was told of this decree, he was seated in deep meditation, his head resting upon his hand; and that when he leaped to his feet with emotion, at the impiety of the declaration, it was observed that the part of his moustache which had been covered by his hand, had suddenly turned gray.

The misery that followed on the publication of these infamous articles was widely spread, and extended to other hearths besides those of the Huguenots. Sword, pestilence, and famine, made a desert of a smiling country; and the universal people, in their common sorrow, cursed all parties alike—“King and Queen, Pope and Calvin,” and only asked from Heaven release from all, and peace for those who suffered by the national divisions. The King, indeed, was neither ill-intentional nor intolerant; but Guise so intrigued as to persuade the “Catholic” part of the nation that Henri was incapable. Faction then began to look upon the powerful subject as the man best qualified to meet the great emergency. He fairly cajoled them into rebellion. They were, indeed, willing to be so cajoled by a leader so liberal of promises, and yet he was known to be as cruel as he engaged himself to be liberal. He often kept his own soldiers at a point barely above starvation; and the slightest insubordination in a regiment entailed the penalty of death. To his foes he was more terrible still. As he stood in the centre of a conquered town that had been held by the Huguenots, it was sport to him to see the latter tossed into the flames. On one occasion he ordered a Huguenot officer to be torn asunder by young horses for no greater crime than mutilating a wooden idol in a church. The officer had placed the mutilated figure on a bastion of the city, with a pike across its breast, as a satire on the guardianship which such a protector was popularly believed to afford.

He could, however, be humane when the humor and good reason for it came together. Thus he parted with a pet lioness, which he kept at his quarters, on the very sufficient ground that the royal beast had, on a certain morning, slain and swallowed one of his favorite footmen! A commonplace lacquey he might have spared without complaining; but he could not, without some irritation, hear of a valet being devoured who, though a valet, had a profound belief that his master was a hero.

The “Bartholomew” had not destroyed all the foes of the name of Guise. What was not accomplished on that day was sought to be achieved by the “League.” The object of this society was to raise the Duke to the throne of Henri, either before or after the death of the latter. The King was childless, and the presumptive heir to the throne, Henri of Navarre, was a Protestant. The Lorrainers had double reason, then, for looking to themselves. The reigning sovereign was the last of three brothers who had inherited the crown, and there was then a superstitious idea that when three brothers had reigned in France, a change of dynasty was inevitable.

Guise fired his followers with the assurance that the invasion of England, and the establishment of Popery there, should be an enterprise which they should be called upon to accomplish. The King was in great alarm at the “League,” but he wisely constituted himself a member. The confederates kept him in the dark as to the chief of their objects. The suspicious monarch, on the other hand, encouraged his minions to annoy his good cousin of Lorraine. One of these unworthy favorites, St. Megrim, did more: he slandered the wife of Guise, who took, thereon, a singular course of trial and revenge. He aroused his Duchess from her solitary couch, in the middle of the night, hissed in her alarmed ear the damning rumor that was abroad, and bade her take at once from his hands the dagger or the poison-cup, which he offered her:—adding that she had better die, having so greatly sinned. The offended and innocent wife cared not for life, since she was suspected, and drank off the contents of the cup, after protestation of her innocence. The draught was of harmless preparation, for the Duke was well assured of the spotless character of a consort whom he himself daily dishonored by his infidelities. He kissed her hand and took his leave; but he sent a score of his trusty-men into the courtyard of the Louvre, who fell on St. Megrim, and butchered him almost on the threshold of the King’s apartments.

The monarch made no complaint at the outrage; but he raised a tomb over the mangled remains of his favorite minion, above which a triad of Cupids represented the royal grief, by holding their stony knuckles to their tearless eyes, affecting the passion which they could not feel.

In the meantime, while the people were being pushed to rebellion at home, the ducal family were intriguing in nearly every court in Europe. Between the intrigues of Guise and the recklessness of the King, the public welfare suffered shipwreck. So nearly complete was the ruin, that it was popularly said, “The Minions crave all: the King gives all; the Queen-mother manages all; Guise opposes all; the Red Ass (the Cardinal) embroils all, and would that the Devil had all!”

But the opposition of Guise was made to some purpose. By exercising it he exacted from the King a surrender of several strong cities. They were immediately garrisoned by Guisards, though held nominally by the sovereign. From the latter the Duke wrung nearly all that it was in the power of the monarch to yield; but when Guise, who had a design against the life of the Protestant Henri of Navarre, asked for a royal decree prohibiting the granting of “quarter” to a Huguenot in the field, the King indignantly banished him from the capital. Guise feigned to obey; but his celebrated sister, the Duchess of Montpensier, refused to share in even a temporary exile. This bold woman went about in public, with a pair of scissors at her girdle, which, as she intimated, would serve for the tonsure of brother Henri of Valois, when weariness should drive him from a palace into a monastery.

The King, somewhat alarmed, called around him his old Swiss body guard, and as the majority of these men professed the reformed faith, Guise made use of the circumstance to obtain greater ends than any he had yet obtained. The people were persuaded that their religion was in peril; and when the Duke, breaking his ban, entered Paris and, gallantly attired, walked by the side of the sedan of Catherine of Medicis, on their way to the Louvre, to remonstrate with the unorthodox king, the church-bells gave their joyous greeting, and the excited populace hung upon the steps of the Duke, showering upon him blessings and blasphemous appellations. “Hosanna to our new son of David!” shouted those who affected to be the most pious; and aged women, kissing his garment as he passed, rose from their knees, exclaiming, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation!”

The less blasphemous or the more sincere sufficiently expressed their satisfaction by hailing him, as he went on his way, smiling, “King of Paris!”

The sound of this title reached the ears of Henri. Coupling it with the unauthorized return of Guise to court, he passed into alternate fits of ungovernable wrath and profound melancholy. He was under the influence of the latter when there fell on his ear, words which make him start from his seat—“Percutiam pastorem, et dispergentur oves;” and when the Monarch looked round for the speaker, he beheld the Abbé d’Elbene, who had thus calmly quoted Scripture, in order to recommend murder. The King, though startled, was not displeased. On the contrary, he smiled; and the smile was yet around his lips, and in his eyes, when Guise entered the presence, and mistook the expression of the royal face for one of welcome. The Duke, emboldened by what he saw, hurried through a long list of grievances, especially dwelling on the lenity, not to say favor, with which Henri treated the heretics generally. The sovereign made a few excuses, which Guise heeded not; on the contrary, he hastened to denounce the body of minions who polluted the palace. “Love me, love my dog,” said Henri, in a hoarse voice. “Yes,” answered Guise, peering into the royal and unnaturally sparkling eyes, “provided he doesn’t bite!” The two men stood revealed before each other; and from that hour the struggle was deadly. Henri would not give away, with reference to his Swiss guard; and Guise, passing through Paris, with his sword unsheathed, awoke the eager spirit of revolt, and looked complacently on while the barricades were raised to impede the march of the execrable Calvinistic Archers of the Guard. The “King of Paris” earned a decisive victory; but before it was achieved, the King of France hurried, in an agony of cowardly affright, from his capital. He gazed for a moment on the city, as he departed, venting curses on its ingratitude; for, said the fugitive Monarch, “I loved you better than I did my own wife;”—which was indisputably true.

Guise might now have ascended the throne, had he not been too circumspect. He deemed the royal cause lost, but he was satisfied for the moment with ruling in the capital, as generalissimo. He stopped the King’s couriers, and opened his letters. He confiscated the property of Huguenots, and sold the same for his own benefit, while he professed to care only for that of the Commonwealth. Finally, he declared that the disturbed condition of affairs should be regulated by a States-General, which he commanded rather than prayed Henri to summon to a meeting at Blois. The King consented; and the 18th of October, 1588, was appointed for the opening. Guise entered the old town with his family, and a host of retainers, cased in armor, and bristling with steel. Henri had his mother Catherine at his side; but there were also a few faithful and unscrupulous followers with him in the palace at Blois; and as he looked on any of those who might happen to salute him in passing, the King smiled darkly, and Percutiam pastorem fell in murmured satisfaction from his lips. The saturnine monarch became, all at once, cheerful in his outward bearing, even when Guise was so ruling the States as to make their proceedings turn to the detriment of the monarchy. The Guise faction became anxious for the safety of their leader, whose quarters were in the palace; but when the King, in token of reconciliation begged the Duke to participate with him in the celebration of the Holy Sacrament, there was scarcely a man capable of interpreting the manner of the times, who did not feel assured that under such a solemn pledge of security, there lay concealed the very basest treachery. Guise, over-confident, scorned alike open warning and dark innuendoes. He was so strong, and his royal antagonist so weak, that he despised the idea of violence being used against him—especially as the keys of the palatial castle were in his keeping, as “Grand-Master” of the Court.

The 23d of December had arrived. The King intimated that he should proceed early in the morning, soon after daybreak (but subsequently to holding a council, to which he summoned the Duke and Cardinal), to the shrine of Our Lady of Clery, some two miles distant; and the keys of the gates were demanded, in order to let Henri have issue at his pleasure, but in reality to keep the Guises within, isolated from their friends without. Larchant, one of the Archers of the Guard, also waited upon the Duke, to pray him to intercede for himself and comrades with the King, in order to obtain for them an increase of pay. “We will do ourselves the honor,” said Larchant, “to prefer our petition to your Highness, in the morning, in a body.” This was a contrivance to prevent Guise from being surprised at seeing so many armed men together in the King’s antechamber, before the council was sitting. Henri passed a sleepless night. His namesake of Guise, who had just sent his Duchess homeward, her approaching confinement being expected, spent the whole of the same night in the apartments of the Countess de Noirmoutier.

He was seen coming thence, before dawn, gayly dressed, and proceeding to the Chapel of the Virgin, to perform his morning devotions. Long before this, the King was a-foot, visiting the select archers who had accepted the bloody mission of ridding the perplexed monarch of his importunate adversary. He posted them, altered the arrangements, reposted them, addressed them again and again on the lawfulness of their office, and had some trouble to suppress an enthusiasm which threatened to wake the Queen-mother, who slept below, and to excite the suspicion of the Guards in the vicinity. Staircase and hall, closet and arras, no coign of vantage but had its assassin ready to act, should his fellows have failed.

Precisely at seven o’clock, Guise, attired in a light suit of gray satin, and followed by Pericart, his secretary, entered the council-chamber, where he found several members assembled; among others, his younger brother, the “Bottle-Cardinal” de Guise. An hour passed without the appearance of any message from the King, who was in an inner apartment, now half-frightened at the pale faces of his own confidants, and anon endeavoring to excite his own resolution, by attempts to encourage theirs. It was a long and weary hour for all parties. As it slowly passed away, Guise, he knew not wherefore, grew anxious. He complained of the cold, and heaped billets of wood upon the fire. He spoke of feeling sick, faint, and unnerved; and from his silver sweetmeat-case he took a few bonbons, by way of breakfast. He subsequently asked for some Damascus raisins, and conserve of roses; but these, when supplied to him did not relieve him of an unaccountable nervousness, which was suddenly increased, when the eye next to the scar from which he derived his appellation of Le Balafré, began to be suffused with tears. He indignantly wiped away the unwelcome suffusion, and had quite recovered as Rivol, Secretary of State, entered, and requested him to attend on the King, who awaited him in his own chamber.

Guise gayly flung his bonbonnière across the council-table, and laughingly bade the grave counsellors scramble for the scattered sweets. He started up, overturned his chair in so doing, drew his thin mantle around him, and with cap and gloves in hand, waved a farewell to the statesmen present. He passed through two rooms, and closely followed by various of the archers, reached the tapestried entrance to the King’s cabinet. No one offered to raise the arras for him. Guise lifted his own right arm to help himself at the same time looking half-round at the archers who were near him. At that moment, a dagger was buried in his breast, up to the very hilt. The blow was delivered by Montsery, from behind. The Duke let fall his hand to the pommel of his sword, when one assassin clung to his legs, a second, also from behind, stabbed him in the neck; while a third passed his weapon through the Duke’s ribs.

Guise’s first cry was, “Ho, friends!” His second, as Sarine ran him through the lower part of the back, was, “Mercy, Jesus!” He struggled faintly across the chamber, bleeding from a dozen wounds, in every one of which sat death. The murderers hacked at him as he staggered, and wildly yet feebly fought. All paused for a moment, when he had reached the extreme end of the room, where he again attempted to raise his sword; but in the act he rolled over, stone dead, at the foot of the bed of Henri III.

At that moment the tapestry was raised, and the king, whispering “Is it done?” approached the body, moodily remarking as he gazed upon it, “He looks greater than he did when living.” Upon the person of the duke was found a manuscript memorandum, in these words:—“To maintain a war in France, I should require 700,000 livres per month.” This memorandum served in the king’s mind as a justification of the murder just committed by his orders. The body was then unceremoniously rolled up in the Turkey carpet on which it had fallen, was covered with quick lime, and flung into the Loire. Some maimed rites were previously performed over it by Dourgin the royal chaplain, who could not mutter the De Profundis without a running and terrified commentary of “Christ!—the awful sight!” Guise’s second cardinal-brother and the Archbishop of Lyons were murdered on the following day; but the lesser victims were forgotten in the fate which had fallen upon the more illustrious, yet certainly more guilty personages.

The widow of Guise, soon after the dread event, gave birth to a son, subsequently the Chevalier Louis de Guise. “The boy,” said the bereaved lady, “came into the world with his hands clasped, as if praying for vengeance on the assassins of his father.” Every male member of the family whom the king could reach was now subjected to arrest. The young heir of Balafré, Charles, now fourth Duke of Guise, was now placed in close restriction in the Castle of Tours, where, sleeping or waking, four living eyes unceasingly watched him—voire même allant â la garderobe—but which eyes he managed to elude nevertheless.

In the meantime Rome excommunicated the murderer of her champion. Paris put on mourning; officials were placed in the street to strip and scourge even ladies who ventured to appear without some sign of sorrow. Wax effigies of the king were brought into the churches, and frantically stabbed by the priests at the altar. The priests then solemnly paraded the streets, chanting as they went, “May God extinguish the Valois!”

The whole city broke into insurrection, and the brother of Guise, the Duke de Mayenne, placed himself at the head of the “league,” whose object was the deposing of the king, and the transferring of the crown to a child of Lorraine. In the contest which ensued, Valois and Navarre united against the Guisards, and carried victory with them wherever they raised their banners. The exultation of Henri III. was only mitigated by the repeated Papal summonses received by him to repair to Rome, and there answer for his crime.

Henri of Navarre induced him to rather think of gaining Paris than of mollifying the Pope; and he was so occupied when the double vengeance of the church and the house of Guise overtook him in the very moment of victory.

The Duchess de Montpensier, sister of the slaughtered duke, had made no secret of her intentions to have public revenge for the deed privately committed, whereby she had lost a brother. There was precaution enough taken that she should not approach the royal army or the king’s quarters; but a woman and a priest rendered all precautions futile. The somewhat gay duchess was on unusually intimate terms with a young monk, named Jacques Clement. This good Brother was a fanatic zealot for his church, and a rather too ardent admirer of the duchess, who turned both sentiments to her own especial purpose. She whispered in his ears a promise, to secure the fulfilment of which, he received with furious haste, the knife which was placed in his hands by the handsomest woman in France. It is said that knife is still preserved, a precious treasure, at Rome.

However this may be, on the 1st of August, 1589, the young Brother, with a weapon hid in the folds of his monkish gaberdine, and with a letter in his hand, sought and obtained access to the king. He went straightforward to his butcher’s work, and had scarcely passed beneath the roof of the royal tent before he had buried the steel deep in the monarch’s bosom. He turned to fly with hot haste to the lady from whom he had received his commission; but a dozen swords and pikes thrust life out of him ere he had made three steps in the direction of his promised recompence.

She who had engaged herself to pay for the crime cared for neither victim. She screamed indeed, but it was with a hysteric joy that threatened to slay her, and which was only allayed by the thought that the last King of the Valois race did not know that he had died by a dagger directed by a sister of Guise.

In testimony of her exultation she distributed green scarfs, the color of Lorraine, to the people of Paris. She brought up from the provinces the mother of Clement, to whom was accorded the distinction of a triumphal entry. Priests and people worshipped the mother of the assassin as she passed wonderingly on her way; and they blasphemously saluted her with the chanted words, “Blessed be the womb that bare him, and the paps that gave him suck.” She was led to the seat of honor at the table of Guise, and Rome sheltered the infamy of the assassin, and revealed its own, by pronouncing his work to be a god-like act. By authority of the Vatican, medals were struck in memory and honor of the dead; but the Huguenots who read thereon the murderer’s profession and name—Frère Jacques Clement—ingeniously discovered therein the anagrammatic interpretation “C’est l’enfer qui m’a crée”—“It is hell that created me.”

The last Valois, with his last breath, had named the Protestant Henri of Navarre as his legal successor to the throne; but between Henri and his inheritance there stood Rome and the Guise faction. Then ensued the successive wars of the League, during which the heavy Mayenne suffered successive defeats at the hands of Henri of the snowy plume. While the contest was raging, the people trusted to the pulpits for their intelligence from the scene of action. From those pulpits was daily uttered more mendacity in one hour than finds expression in all the horse-fairs of the United Kingdom in a year. When famine decimated those who lived within the walls, the people were reduced to live upon a paste made from human bones, and which they called “Madame de Montpensier’s cake.”

Henri of Navarre, their deliverer, did not arrive before the gates of Paris without trouble. In 1521, Charles of Guise, the young Duke, had escaped most gallantly, in open day, from the Castle of Tours, by sliding from the ramparts, down a rope, which simply blistered his hands and made a rent in his hose. He was speedily accoutred and in the field, with Spain in his rear to help him. Now, he was making a dash at Henri’s person; and, anon, leaping from his camp-bed to escape him. At other times he was idle, while his uncle Mayenne pursued the cherished object of their house—that crown which was receding from them more swiftly than ever. For the alert Bourbon, the slow and hard-drinking Mayenne was no match. The latter thought once to catch the former in his lady’s bower, but the wakeful lover was gayly galloping back to his quarters before the trumpets of Mayenne had sounded to “boot and saddle.” “Mayenne,” said the Pope, “sits longer at table than Henri lies in bed.”

The gates of Paris were open to Henri on the 21st of March, 1591. Old Cardinal Pellevi died of disgust and indignation, on hearing of the fact. The Duchess of Montpensier, after tearing her hair, and threatening to swoon, prudently concluded, with Henry IV., not only her own peace, but that of her family. The chief members of the house of Guise were admitted into places of great trust, to the injury of more deserving individuals. The young Duke de Guise affected a superabundant loyalty. In return, the King not only gave him the government of several chief towns, but out of compliment to him forbade the exercise of Protestant worship within the limits of the Duke’s government! Such conduct was natural to a King, who to secure his throne had abandoned his faith; who lightly said that he had no cannon so powerful as the canon of the mass, and who was destitute of most virtues save courage and good-nature. The latter was abused by those on whom it was lavished; and the various assaults upon his life were supposed to be directed by those very Guises, on whom he had showered places, pensions, and pardons, which they were constantly needing and continually deriding.

The young Duke of Guise enjoyed, among other appointments, that of Governor of Marseilles. He was light-hearted, selfish, vain, and cruel. He hanged his own old partisans in the city, as enemies to the king; and he made his name for ever infamous by the seduction of the beautiful and noble orphan-girl, Marcelle de Castellane, whom he afterward basely abandoned, and left to die of hunger. He sent her a few broad pieces by the hands of a lacquey; but the tardy charity was spurned, and the poor victim died. He had little time to think of her at the brilliant court of the first Bourbon, where he and those of his house struggled to maintain a reputation which had now little to support it, but the memories of the past—and many of those were hardly worth appealing to. He was a mere fine gentleman, bold withal, and therewith intriguing; ever hoping that the fortunes of his house might once more turn and bring it near a throne, and in the meantime, making himself remarkable for his vanity, his airs of greatness, and his affectation. Brave as he was, he left his brothers, the cardinal and chevalier, to draw their swords and settle the quarrels which were constantly raging on disputed questions touching the assumed Majesty of the House of Guise.

The streets of Paris formed the stage on which these bloody tragedies were played, but they, and all other pretensions, were suppressed by that irresistible putter-down of such nuisances—the Cardinal de Richelieu. He used the sword of Guise as long as it was needed, but when Charles became troublesome the Cardinal not only banished him, but wounded the pride of his family by placing garrisons in the hitherto sovereign duchy of Lorraine. When Cardinal Fleury subsequently annexed Lorraine itself to the territory of France, the Guises thought the world was at an end. The universe, however, survived the shock.

Duke Charles died in exile at Cune, near Sienne, in the year 1640. Of his ten children by the Duchess de Joyeuse, he left five surviving. He was succeeded by Henri, the eldest, who was bishop and cardinal. He had been raised to the episcopate while yet in the arms of his wet-nurse; and he was in frocks when on his long curls was placed the scarlet hat of a cardinal. He was twenty years of age when he became Duke of Guise. He at once flung away all he possessed of his religious profession—its dress and titles, and walked abroad, spurs on his heels, a plume in his cap, and a long sword and a bad heart between!

The whole life of this chivalrous scoundrel was a romance, no portion of which reflects any credit on the hero. He had scarcely reached the age of manhood, when he entered into a contract of marriage with the beautiful Anne of Gonzaga. He signed the compact, not in ink, but with his own blood, calling Heaven to witness, the while, that he would never address a vow to any other lady. The breath of perjury had scarcely passed his lips when he married the Countess of Bossu, and he immediately abandoned her to sun himself in the eyes of Mademoiselle de Pons—an imperious mistress, who squandered the property he lavished on her, and boxed the ex-cardinal’s ears, when he attempted, with degrading humility, to remonstrate with her for bringing down ruin upon his estate.

He was as disloyal to his King as to his “lady;” he tampered with rebellion, was sentenced to death, and was pardoned. But a state of decent tranquillity agreed ill with his constitution. To keep that and his nerves from rusting, he one day drew his sword in the street, upon the son of Coligny, whose presence seemed a reproach to him, and whom he slew on the spot. He wiped his bloody rapier on his mantle, and betook himself for a season to Rome, where he intrigued skilfully, but fruitlessly, in order to obtain the tiara for the brother of Mazarin. Apathy would now have descended upon him, but for a voice from the city of Naples, which made his swelling heart beat with a violence that almost threatened to kill.

Masaniello had just concluded his brief and mad career. The Neapolitans were not, on that account, disposed to submit again to Spain. They were casting about for a King, when Guise presented himself. This was in the year 1647. He left France in a frail felucca, with a score of bold adventurers wearing the colors of Lorraine, intertwined with “buff,” in compliment to the Duke’s mistress. The Church blessed the enterprise. The skiff sped unharmed through howling storms and thundering Spanish fleets; and when the Duke stepped ashore at Naples, and mounted a charger, the shouting populace who preceded him, burnt incense before the new-comer, as if he had been a coming god.

For love and bravery, this Guise was unequalled. He conquered all his foes, and made vows to all the ladies. In love he lost, however, all the fruits of bravery. Naples was but a mock Sardanapalian court, when the Spaniards at length mustered strongly enough to attack the new, bold, but enervated King. They took him captive, and held him, during four years, a prisoner in Spain. He gained liberty by a double lie, the common coin of Guise. He promised to reveal to the Court of Madrid the secrets of the Court of Paris; and bound himself by bond and oath never to renew his attempt on Naples. His double knavery, however, brought him no profit. At length, fortune seeming to disregard the greatness of his once highly-favored house, this restless reprobate gradually sunk into a mere court beau, passing his time in powdering his peruke, defaming reputations, and paying profane praise to the patched and painted ladies of the palace. He died before old age, like most of the princes of his house: and in his fiftieth year this childless man left his dignity and an evil name to his nephew, Louis Joseph.

The sixth Duke bore his greatness meekly and briefly. He was a kind-hearted gentleman, whose career of unobtrusive usefulness was cut short by small-pox in 1671. When he died, there lay in the next chamber an infant in the cradle. This was his little son Joseph, not yet twelve months old, and all unconscious of his loss, in a father; or of his gain, in a somewhat dilapidated coronet. On his young brow that symbol of his earthly rank rested during only four years. The little Noble then fell a victim to the disease which had carried off his sire, and made of himself a Duke—the last, the youngest, the most innocent, and the happiest of the race.

During a greater portion of the career of the Dukes, priest and swordsman in the family had stood side by side, each menacing to the throne; the one in knightly armor, the other in the dread panoply of the Church. Of the seven ducal chieftains of the house, there is only one who can be said to have left behind him a reputation for harmlessness; and perhaps that was because he lived at a time when he had not the power to be offensive. The boy on the mule, in 1506, and the child in the cradle, in 1676, are two pleasant extremes of a line where all between is, indeed, fearfully attractive, but of that quality also which might make not only men but angels weep.

It must be confessed that the Dukes of Guise played for a high prize; and lost it. More than once, however, they were on the very point of grasping the attractive but delusive prize. If they were so near triumph, it was chiefly through the co-operation of their respective brothers, the proud and able Cardinals. The Dukes were representatives of brute force; the Cardinals, of that which is far stronger, power of intellect. The former often spoiled their cause by being demonstrative. The latter never trusted to words when silver served their purpose equally well. When they did speak, it was with effective brevity. We read of a Lacedemonian who was fined for employing three words to express what might have been as effectually stated in two. No churchman of the house of Guise ever committed the fault of the Lacedemonian.

Cardinal John of Lorraine was the brother of the first Duke Claude. When the latter was a boy, riding his mule into France, John was the young Bishop-coadjutor of Metz. He was little more than two years old when he was first appointed to this responsible office. He was a Cardinal before he was out of his teens; and in his own person was possessed of twelve bishoprics and archbishoprics. Of these, however, he modestly retained but three, namely, Toul, Narbonne, and Alby—as they alone happened to return revenues worth acceptance. Not that he was selfish, seeing that he subsequently applied for, and received the Archbishopric of Rheims, which he kindly held for his nephew Charles, who was titular thereof, at the experienced age of ten. His revenues were enormous, and he was for ever in debt. He was one of the most skilful negotiators of his time; but whether deputed to emperor or pope, he was seldom able to commence his journey until he had put in pledge three or four towns, in order to raise money to defray his expenses. His zeal for what he understood as religion was manifested during the short but bloody campaign against the Protestants of Alsatia, where he accompanied his brother. At the side of the Cardinal, on the field of battle, stood the Apostolic Commissary, and a staff of priestly aides-de-camp. While some of these encouraged the orthodox troops to charge the Huguenots, the principal personages kept their hands raised to Heaven; and when the pennons of the army of Reformers had all gone down before the double cross of Lorraine, the Cardinal and his ecclesiastical staff rode to the church of St. Nicholas and sang Te Deum laudamus.

The chivalrous Cardinal was another man in his residence of the Hotel de Cluny. Of this monastery he made a mansion, in which a Sybarite might have dwelt without complaining. It was embellished, decorated, and furnished with a gorgeousness that had its source at once in his blind prodigality, his taste for the arts, and his familiar patronage of artists. The only thing not to be found in this celebrated mansion was the example of a good life. But how could this example be found in a prelate who assumed and executed the office of instructing the maids of honor in their delicate duties. Do Thou says it was an occupation for which he was pre-eminently fitted; and Brantome pauses, in his gay illustrations of the truth of this assertion, to remark with indignation, that if the daughters of noble houses arrived at court, endowed with every maiden virtue, Cardinal John was the man to despoil them of their dowry.

He was, nevertheless, not deficient in tastes and pursuits of a refined nature. He was learned himself, and he loved learning in others. His purse, when there was anything in it, was at the service of poor scholars and of sages with great purposes in view. He who deemed the slaughter of Protestant peasants a thing to thank God for, had something like a heart for clever sneerers at Papistry and also for Protestants of talent. Thus he pleaded the cause of the amphibious Erasmus, extended his protection to the evangelical Clement Marot, and laughed and drank with Rabelais, the caustic curé of Meudon. He was, moreover, the boon companion of Francis I., a man far less worthy of his intimacy than the equivocating Erasmus, the gentle Marot, or roystering Rabelais, who painted the manners of the court and church of his day, in his compound characters of Gargantua and Panurge.

He was a liberal giver, but he gave with an ostentation for which there is no warrant in the gospel. At one period of his life he walked abroad with a game-bag full of crowns slung from his neck. On passing beggars he bestowed, without counting, a rich alms, requesting prayers in return. He was known as the “game-bag Cardinal.” On one occasion, when giving largesse to a blind mendicant in Rome, the latter was so astonished at the amount of the gift, that, pointing to the giver, he exclaimed, “If thou art not Jesus Christ, thou art John of Lorraine.”

He was bold in his gallantry. When sent by Francis I. to negotiate some political business with the pope, he passed through Piedmont, where he was for a while the guest of the Duke and Duchess of Savoy. The duchess, on the cardinal being presented, gravely offered her hand (she was a Portuguese princess) to be kissed. John of Lorraine, however, would not stoop so low, and made for her lips. A struggle ensued, which was maintained with rude persistance on one side, and with haughty and offended vigor on the other, until her highness’s head, being firmly grasped within his eminence’s arm, the cardinal kissed the ruffled princess two or three times on the mouth, and then, with an exultant laugh, released her.

The second cardinal of this branch, Charles of Lorraine, was brother of the second duke. He was the greatest man of his family, and the most powerful of his age. His ambition was to administer the finances of France, and he did so during three reigns, with an annual excess of expenditure over income, of two millions and a half. He was rather dishonest than incapable. His enemies threatened to make him account; he silenced them with the sound of the tocsin of St. Bartholomew, and when the slaughter was over he merrily asked for the presence of the accusers who had intended to make him refund.

He was an accomplished hypocrite, and at heart a religious reformer. At last he acknowledged to the leaders of the reformatory movement, whom he admitted to his familiarity, that the Reformation was necessary and warrantable; and yet policy made of him the most savage enemy that Protestantism ever had in France. He urged on the king to burn noble heretics rather than the common people; and when Henri was touched with compassion, in his dying moments, for some Protestant prisoners capitally condemned, the cardinal told him that the feeling came of the devil, and that it was better they should perish. And they perished.

He introduced the Inquisition into France, and was made Grand Inquisitor at the moment the country was rejoicing for the recovery of Calais from the English. And this was the man who, at the Council of Trent, advocated the celebration of divine worship in the vernacular tongue. He was the friend of liberty to the Gallican church, but he took the other side on finding that liberal advocacy periled his chances of being pope. The living pope used and abused him. “I am scandalized,” said his holiness, “at finding you still in the enjoyment of the revenues of so many sees.” “I would resign them all,” said the cardinal, “for a single bishopric.” “Which bishopric?” asked the pope. “Marry!” exclaimed Cardinal Charles, “the bishopric of Rome.”

He was as haughty as he was aspiring. The Guise had induced the weak Anthony of Navarre to turn Romanist; but the cardinal did not treat that king with more courtesy on that account. One frosty morning, not only did the princely priest keep the mountain king tarrying at his garden gate for an audience, but when he went down to his majesty, he listened, all befurred as he was, to the shivering monarch who humbly preferred his suit, cap in hand.

He was covetous and haughty, but he sometimes found his match. His niece, Mary Stuart, had quarreled with Catherine de Medicis, whose especial wrath had been excited by Mary’s phrase applied to Catherine, of “The Florentine tradeswoman.” The Scottish Queen resolved, after this quarrel, to repair to the North. The cardinal was at her side when she was examining her jewels, previously to their being packed up. He tenderly remarked that the sea was dangerous, the jewels costly, and that his niece could not do better than leave them in his keeping. “Good uncle,” said the vivacious Mary, “I and my jewels travel together. If I trust one to the sea, I may the other; and therewith, adieu!” The cardinal bit his lips and blessed her.

Ranke is puzzled where to find the principal author of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. There is no difficulty in the matter. The Guises had appealed to the chances of battle to overcome their chief adversaries in the kingdom. But for every Huguenot father slain, there arose as many filial avengers as he had sons. The causes of quarrel were individual as well as general. A Huguenot had slain the second Duke, and his widow was determined to be avenged. The Cardinal was wroth with the King for retaining Protestant archers in his body-guard. The archers took an unclean vengeance, and defiled the pulpit in the Chapel Royal, wherefrom the Cardinal was accustomed to denounce the doctrine of their teachers. His Eminence formed the confederacy by which it was resolved to destroy the enemy at a blow. To the general causes, I need not allude. The plot itself was formed in Oliver Clisson’s house, in Paris, known as “the Hotel of Mercy.” But the representatives of Rome and Spain, united with those of France, met upon the frontier, and there made the final arrangements which were followed by such terrible consequences. When the stupendous deed was being done, the Cardinal was absent from France; but he fairly took upon himself the guilt, when he conferred the hand of his illegitimate daughter Anne d’Arne on the officer Besme whose dagger had given the first mortal stab to Coligny, the chief of the immolated victims of that dreadful day—and Rome approved.

As a public controversialist he shone in his dispute with Beza. Of his pride, we have an illustration in what is recorded of him in the Council of Trent. The Spanish embassador had taken a place, at mass, above that of the embassador from France. Thereupon, the reverend Cardinal raised such a commotion in the cathedral, and dwelt so loudly and strongly in expletives, that divine worship was suspended, and the congregation broke up in most admired disorder.

So at the coronation, in the Abbey of St. Dennis, of the Queen of Charles IX. The poor, frail, Austrian Princess Elizabeth, after being for hours on her knees, declared her incapacity for remaining any longer without some material support from food or wine. The Cardinal declared that such an irreligious innovation was not to be thought of. He stoutly opposed, well-fed man that he was, the supplying of any refreshment to the sinking Queen; and it was only when he reflected that her life might be imperiled that he consented to “the smallest quantity of something very light,” being administered to her.

He was the only man of his family who was not possessed of the knightly virtue of bravery. He was greatly afraid of being assassinated. In council, he was uncourteous. Thus, he once accused the famous Chancellor le Hospital of wishing to be “the cock of the assembly,” and when the grave chancellor protested against such language, the Cardinal qualified him as “an old ram.” It may be added that, if he feared the dagger directed by private vengeance, he believed himself protected by the guardianship of Heaven, which more than once, as he averred, carried him off in clouds and thunder, when assassins were seeking him. He was wily enough to have said this, in order to deter all attempts at violence directed against himself.

He died edifyingly, kissed Catherine de Medicis, and was believed by the latter, to mysteriously haunt her, long after his death. The real footing on which these two personages stood has yet to be discovered by curious inquiries.

The Cardinal-brother of the third Duke, Louis of Lorraine, loved good living, and was enabled at an early age to indulge his propensities, out of the rich revenues which he derived from his numerous ecclesiastical preferments. He held half a dozen abbeys while he was yet in his cradle; and he was a bishop at the mature age of eighteen. Just before his death, in 1598, when he was about fifty years of age, he resigned his magnificent church appointments, in favor of his nephew and namesake, who was to be a future Cardinal at the side of the fourth Duke. Louis was a man of ability and of wit. He chose a device for his own shield of arms. It consisted of nine zeros, with this apt motto: “Hoc per se nihil est; sed si minimum addideris, maximum erit,” intending, it is said, to imply that man was nothing till grace was given him. He was kindly-dispositioned, loved his ease, was proud of his church, and had a passion for the bottle. That was his religion. His private life was not marked by worse traits than those that characterized his kinsmen in the priesthood. He showed his affection for his mother after a truly filial fashion, bequeathing to her all his estates, in trust, to pay his debts.

The third duke had a second cardinal-brother, known as the Cardinal de Guise, who was murdered by Henri III. He was an intriguer; but as brave as any knight of his family. It was long before the king could find men willing to strike a priest; and when they were found, they approached him again and again, before they could summon nerve wherewith to smite him. After all, this second murder at Blois was effected by stratagem. The cardinal was requested to accompany a messenger to the royal presence. He complied with some misgiving, but when he found himself in a dark corridor with four frowning soldiers, he understood his doom; requested a few moments respite to collect his thoughts; and then, enveloping his head in his outer robe, bade them execute their bloody commission. He was instantly slain, without offering resistance, or uttering a word.

This cardinal was father of five illegitimate sons, of whom the most celebrated was the Baron of Ancerville, or, as he proudly designated himself, “Bastard of Guise.”

By the side of the son of Balafré, Charles, the fourth duke, there stood the last cardinal-brother who was able to serve his house, and whose character presents any circumstance of note. This cardinal, if he loved anything more than the bottle, was fondest of a battle. He characteristically lost his life by both. He was present at the siege of St. Jean d’Angely, held by the Protestants in the year 1621. It was on the 20th of May; and the sun was shining with a power not known to our severe springs. The cardinal fought like a fiend, and swore with more than fiendish capacity. The time was high noon, and he himself was in the noontide of his wondrous vigor, some thirty years of age. He was laying about him in the bloody mêlée which occurred in the suburb, when he paused for awhile, panting for breath and streaming with perspiration. He called for a flask of red wine, which he had scarcely quaffed when he was seized with raging fever, which carried him off within a fortnight. He was so much more addicted to knightly than to priestly pursuits, that, at the time of his death, a negotiation was being carried on to procure from the pope permission for the cardinal to give up to his lay-brother, the Duc de Chevreuse, all his benefices, and to receive in return the duke’s governorship of Auvergne. He was for ever in the saddle, and never more happy than when he saw another before him with a resolute foe firmly seated therein. He lived the life of a soldier of fortune, or knight-errant; and when peace temporarily reigned, he rode over the country with a band of followers, in search of adventures, and always found them at the point of their swords. He left the altar to draw on his boots, gird his sword to his hip, and provoke his cousin De Nevers to a duel, by striking him in the face. The indignant young noble regretted that the profession of his insulter covered the latter with impunity, and recommended him, at the same time, to abandon it, and to give De Nevers satisfaction. “To the devil I have sent it already!” said the exemplary cardinal, “when I flung off my frock, and belted on my sword:” and the two kinsmen would have had their weapons in each other’s throat, but for the royal officers, who checked their Christian amusement.

This roystering cardinal, who was interred with more pomp than if he had been a great saint, or a merely honest man, left five children. Their mother was Charlotte des Escar. They were recognised as legitimate, on allegation that their parents had been duly married, on papal dispensation. He was the last of the cardinals, and was as good a soldier as any of the knights.

Neither the pride nor the pretensions of the house expired with either Dukes or Cardinals. There were members of the family whose arrogance was all the greater because they were not of the direct line of succession. Their great ambition in little things was satisfied with the privilege granted to the ladies of Guise, namely, the one which they held in common with royal princesses, at being presented at court previous to their marriage. This ambition gained for them, however, the hatred of the nobles and the princes of the Church, and at length caused a miniature insurrection in the palace at Versailles.

The occasion was the grand ball given in honor of the nuptials of Marie Antoinette and the Dauphin. Louis XV. had announced that he would open the brilliant scene by dancing a minuet with Mlle. de Lorraine, sister of the Prince de Lambesc. The uproar that ensued was terrific. The entire body of nobility protested against such marked precedence being allowed to the lady in question. The Archbishop of Rheims placed himself at the head of the opposing movement; and, assembling the indignant peerage, this successor of the Apostles, in company with his episcopal brother from Noyon, came to the solemnly important resolution, that between the princes of the blood-royal and haute noblesse there could be no intermediate rank; and that Mlle. de Lorraine, consequently, could not take precedence of the female members of the aristocracy, who had been presented. A memorial was drawn up. The entire nobility, old and new, signed it eagerly; and the King was informed that if he did not rescind his determination, no lady would dance at the ball after the minuet in question had been performed. The King exerted himself to overcome the opposition: but neither bishops nor baronesses would give way. The latter, on the evening of the ball, walked about the grand apartments in undress, expressed loudly their resolution not to dance, and received archiepiscopal benison for their pious obstinacy. The matter was finally arranged by compromise, whereby the Dauphin and the Count d’Artois were to select partners among the nobility, and not, as was de rigueur, according to the law of minuets, among princesses of their own rank. The hour for opening the famous ball was retarded in order to give the female insurrectionists time to dress, and ultimately all went off à merveille!

With the Prince de Lambesc above-named, the race of Guise disappeared altogether from the soil of France. He was colonel of the cavalry regiment, Royal Allemand, which in 1789 came into collision with the people. The Prince was engaged, with his men, in dispersing a seditious mob. He struck one of the most conspicuous of the rioters with the flat of his sword. This blow, dealt by a Guise, was the first given in the great Revolution, and it helped to deprive Louis XVI. of his crown. The Prince de Lambesc was compelled to fly from the country, to escape the indignation of the people. Nearly three centuries before, his great ancestor, the boy of the mule, had entered the kingdom, and founded a family which increased in numbers and power against the throne, and against civil and religious liberty. And now, the sole survivor of the many who had sprung from this branch of Lorraine, as proud, too, as the greatest of his house, having raised his finger against the freedom of the mob, was driven into exile, to seek refuge for a time, and a grave for age, on the banks of the distant Danube.

When Cardinal Fleury annexed the Duchy of Lorraine to France, it was by arrangement with Austria; according to which, Francis, Duke of Lorraine, received in exchange for his Duchy, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the hand of Maria Theresa. Their heirs form the imperial house of Hapsburgh-Lorraine. Such of my readers as have visited Nancy, the capital of old Lorraine, will remember there the round chapel near what is left of the old palace of the old Dukes. This chapel contains the tombs of the principal of the twenty-nine Dukes who ruled sovereignly in Lorraine. The expense of supporting the service and fabric, altar and priests, connected with this chapel, is sustained entirely by Austria. It is the only remnant preserved of the Lorraine sovereignty of the olden time. The priests and employes in the edifice speak of Hapsburgh-Lorraine as their house, to which they owe exclusive homage. When I heard expression given to this sentiment, I was standing in front of the tomb of that famous etcher, old Jean Callot. The latter was a native of Nancy; and I could almost fancy that his merry-looking lip curled with scorn at the display of this rag of pride in behalf of the house of Lorraine.

With the story of part of that house I fear I may have detained the reader too long. I will tell more briefly the shifting fortunes of a material house, the knightly edifice of Rambouillet.