dition precedent to those
marriages had long been known. It was the renunciation of the alliance
between France and Holland. It was the condemnation to death, so far as
France had the power to condemn her to death, of the young Republic. Had
not Don Pedro de Toledo pompously announced this condition a year and a
half before? Had not Henry spurned the bribe with scorn? And now had not
Francis Aerssens been the first to communicate to his masters the fruit
which had already ripened upon Henry's grave? As we have seen, he had
revealed these intrigues long before they were known to the world, and
the French court knew that he had revealed them. His position had become
untenable. His friendship for Henry could not be of use to him with the
delicate-featured, double-chinned, smooth and sluggish Florentine, who
had passively authorized and actively profited by her husband's murder.

It was time for the Envoy to be gone. The Queen-Regent and Concini
thought so. And so did Villeroy and Sillery and the rest of the old
servants of the King, now become pensionaries of Spain. But Aerssens did
not think so. He liked his position, changed as it was. He was deep in
the plottings of Bouillon and Conde and the other malcontents against the
Queen-Regent. These schemes, being entirely personal, the rank growth of
the corruption and apparent disintegration of France, were perpetually
changing, and could be reduced to no principle. It was a mere struggle of
the great lords of France to wrest places, money, governments, military
commands from the Queen-Regent, and frantic attempts on her part to save
as much as possible of the general wreck for her lord and master Concini.

It was ridiculous to ascribe any intense desire on the part of the Duc de
Bouillon to aid the Protestant cause against Spain at that moment, acting
as he was in combination with Conde, whom we have just seen employed by
Spain as the chief instrument to effect the destruction of France and the
bastardy of the Queen's children. Nor did the sincere and devout
Protestants who had clung to the cause through good and bad report, men
like Duplessis-Mornay, for example, and those who usually acted with him,
believe in any of these schemes for partitioning France on pretence of
saving Protestantism. But Bouillon, greatest of all French fishermen in
troubled waters, was brother-in-law of Prince Maurice of Nassau, and
Aerssens instinctively felt that the time had come when he should a