d the civil wars had almost invested it in her eyes with the appearance
of justifiable retaliation. She had gloated in secret over the story of
the Queen Blanche, mother of Louis the Ninth, and her successful struggle
with her son's insubordinate nobles, telling her countryman, the Venetian
ambassador Correro, with a significant laugh such as she was wont
occasionally to indulge in, that she would be very sorry to have it known
that she had been reading the old manuscript chronicle, for they would at
once infer that she had taken the Castilian princess as her pattern.[796]
More unscrupulous than the mother of St. Louis, she had revolved in her
mind various schemes for strengthening her authority at the expense of the
lives of a few of the more prominent Huguenot chiefs, convinced, as she
was, that Protestantism would cease to exist in France with the
destruction of its leaders. But, despite pontifical injunctions and
Spanish exhortations, she formed no definite plans; or, if she did, it was
only to unravel on the morrow what she had woven the day before. What
Barbaro said of her at one critical juncture was true of her generally in
all such deliberations: "Her irresolution is extreme; she conceives new
plans from hour to hour; within the compass of a single day, between
morning and evening, she will change her mind three times.[797]"

[Sidenote: Charles the Ninth in earnest.]

[Sidenote: He tears out the record against Cardinal Chatillon.]

While it is scarcely possible to believe Catharine to have been more
sincere in the adoption of this peace than in any other event of her life,
we may feel some confidence that her son was really in favor of peace for
its own sake. He was weary of the war, jealous of his brother Anjou,
disgusted with the Guises, and determined to attempt to conciliate his
Huguenot subjects, whom he had in vain been trying to crush. Apparently he
wished to make of the amnesty, which the edict formally proclaimed, a
veritable act of oblivion of all past offences, and intended to regard the
Huguenots, in point of fact as well as in law, as his faithful subjects.
An incident which occurred about two months after the conclusion of peace,
throws light upon the king's new disposition. Cardinal Odet de Chatillon,
deprived by the Pope of his seat in the Roman consistory, had, on motion
of Cardinal Bourbon, been declared by the Parisian parliament to have lost
his bishopric of Beauvais, on account of his rebel