the king, protested "that he had not, and would never
have desired to, put forward anything against the prince's honor, and
that he had been neither the author nor the instigator of his
imprisonment." "Sir," said Conde, "I consider wicked and contemptible
him or them who caused it." "So I think, sir," answered Guise, "and it
does not apply to me at all." Whereupon they embraced, and a report was
drawn up of the ceremony, which was called their reconciliation. Just as
it was ending, Marshal Francis de Montmorency, eldest son of the
constable, and far more inclined than his father was towards the cause of
the Reformers, arrived with a numerous troop of friends, whom he had
mustered to do honor to Conde. The court was a little excited at this
incident. The constable declared that, having the honor to be so closely
connected with the princes of Bourbon, his son would have been to blame
if he had acted differently. The aged warrior had himself negotiated
this reconciliation; and when it was accomplished, and the Duke of Guise
had performed his part in it with so much complaisance, the constable
considered himself to be quits with his former allies, and free to
follow his leaning towards the Catholic party. "The veteran," says the
Duke of Autnale, "did not pique himself on being a theologian; but he
was sincerely attached to the Catholic faith because it was the old
religion and the king's; and he separated himself definitively from
those religious and political innovators whom he had at first seemed to
countenance, and amongst whom he reckoned his nearest relatives." In
vain did his eldest son try to hold him back; a close union was formed
between the Constable de Montmorency, the Duke of Guise, and Marshal de
Saint-Andre, and it became the Catholic triumvirate against which
Catherine de' Medici had at one time to defend herself, and of which she
had at another to avail herself in order to carry out the policy of
see-saw she had adopted as her chief means of government.

Before we call to mind and estimate as they deserve the actions of that
government, we must give a correct idea of the moral condition of the
people governed, of their unbridled passions, and of the share of
responsibility reverting to them in the crimes and shocking errors of
that period. It is a mistake and an injustice, only too common, to lay
all the burden of such facts, and the odium justly due to them, upon the
great actors almost exclusively