e
that there were a few strong-minded individuals even at the period of
which we treat who refused to submit their reason to the wild and
illogical superstitions which were rife about them; but these formed a
very small portion of the aggregate population, and from the peasant in
his hovel to the monarch on his throne the plague-spot of credulity had
spread and festered, until it presented a formidable feature in the
history of the time. It is curious to remark that L'Etoile, the most
commonplace and unimaginative of chroniclers, who might well have been
expected in his realism to treat such phantasies as puerile and absurd,
seems to justify to his own mind the extreme penalties of the scaffold
and the stake as a fitting punishment for sorcerers and magicians:
declaring them, as he records in his usual terse and matter-of-fact
style, to be dictated by justice, and essential to the repression of an
intercourse between men and evil spirits.

Gabrielle d'Estrees was the dupe, if, indeed, not the victim, of her
firm faith in astrology. She had been assured that "a child would
prevent her from attaining the rank to which she aspired;" [146] and the
predisposition of an excited nervous system probably assisted the
verification of the prophecy. The old Cardinal de Bourbon,[147] whom the
Leaguers would fain have made their king, was seduced from his fidelity
to the illustrious race from which he sprang by his weak reliance upon
the predictions of soothsayers, who thus degraded him into the tool of
the wily Due de Guise;[148] while his nephew, Charles II, also a
Cardinal,[149] even more infatuated than himself, had been impelled to
believe that the disease which was rapidly sapping his existence was the
effect of the machinations of a Court lady by whom he had been
bewitched! Traitors found excuse for their treason in the assertion that
they had been deluded by false predictions or ensnared by magic;[150]
princes were governed in their political movements by astral
calculations;[151] a grave minister details with complacency, although
without comment, various anecdotes of the operation of the occult
sciences,[152] and even makes them a study; while a European monarch,
strong in the love of his people and his own bravery, suffers the
predictions of soothsayers and prophets to cloud his mind and to shake
his purposes, even while he declares his contempt for all such
delusions.[153]

That such was actually the case is proved by D