e perplexities of the political situation under two questions: How to
relieve the people, now thoroughly exhausted;[982] and, how to rescue
the crown from its poverty. But, in reality, the financial embarrassment
was the least of the difficulties of the position Catharine had assumed.
The kingdom was rent with dissensions. Two religions were
struggling--the one for exclusive supremacy, the other at least for
toleration and recognition. Catharine had no strong religious
convictions to actuate her in deciding which of the two she should
embrace. Two powerful political parties were contending for the
ascendency--that of the princes of the blood and of constitutional
usage, and that of an ambitious family newly introduced into the
kingdom, but a family which had succeeded in attaching to itself most,
if not all, of the favorites of preceding kings. Catharine's ambition,
in the absence of any convictions of right, regarded the success of
either as detrimental to her own authority. She had, therefore, resolved
to play off the one against the other, in the hope of being able,
through their mutual antagonism, to become the mistress of both. Under
the reign of Francis the Second she had gained some notion of the
humiliation to which the Guises, in their moment of fancied security,
would willingly have reduced her. Yet, after all, the illegal usurpation
of the Guises, who might, from their past experience, be more tolerant
of her ambitious designs, was less formidable to her than the claims of
the Bourbon princes, based as were these claims upon ancestral usage and
right, and equally fatal to her pretensions and to those of their
rivals. It was a situation of appalling difficulty for a woman sustained
in her course by no lofty consciousness of integrity and devotion to
duty--for a woman who was by nature timid, and by education inclined to
resort for guidance to judicial astrology or magic rather than to
religion.[983]

[Sidenote: Opening of the States General, Dec. 13, 1560.]

A brief delay in the opening of the sessions of the States General was
necessitated by the sudden change in the administration. At length, on
the thirteenth of December, the pompous ceremonial took place in the
city of Orleans. It was graced by the presence of the boy-king, Charles
the Ninth, and of his mother, his brother, the future Henry the Third,
and his sister Margaret. The King of Navarre, the aged Renee of Ferrara,
and other members of the royal h