unsellors at the time of Coligny's visit.
This was the proposed marriage of young Henry, the Prince of Bearn, and
after his mother's death heir of the crown of Navarre, to Margaret of
Valois, the youngest sister of Charles the Ninth. Margaret, who had lately
entered upon her twentieth year, was a year and a half older than the
prince.[854] In a court and a state of society where the birth of a
daughter was the signal for the initiation of an unlimited number of
matrimonial projects, it is not surprising that this match, among many
others, was talked of in the very infancy of the parties, perhaps with
little expectation that anything would ever come of it. The prince was a
sprightly boy, and, it is said, so delighted his namesake, Henry the
Second, that the monarch playfully asked him whether he would like to be
his son-in-law--a question which the boy found no difficulty in answering
in the affirmative. In fact, the matter went so far that, when the young
Bearnese was little over three years of age, Antoine of Bourbon wrote to
his sister, the Duchess of Nevers, with undisguised delight, of "the favor
the king has been pleased to show me by the agreement between us for the
marriage of Madam Margaret, his daughter, with my eldest son--a thing
which I accept as so particular a token of his good grace, that I am now
at rest and satisfied with what I could most ardently desire in this
world."[855] But the boy's mother had not been inclined to accept the
king's offer to take and educate him with his own children.[856] She was
not very familiar with the disorders of the royal court; but she had seen
enough to convince her that the quiet plains at the foot of the Pyrenees
could furnish a safer school of manners and morals. More than once the
idea of the connection between the crowns of France and Navarre was
revived, and in 1562 Catharine bethought herself of it as a means of
detaching the unfortunate Antoine from the triumvirs, whose cause he had
espoused with such strange infatuation.[857] But other plans soon
diverted the ambitious mind of the Italian queen. Moreover, the civil wars
between Protestants and Roman Catholics made the marriage of the daughter
of the "Very Christian King" to the son of the most obstinate Huguenot in
France appear to be out of the range of propriety or likelihood. Meantime,
Margaret's union with Sebastian of Portugal was seriously discussed.[858]
The tiresome negotiations ended in January, 1571, with