of
a party-chief completely awakened and tamed by experience: it made him
disgusted with fanaticism, faction, civil war, and complicity with the
foreigner. He was the least brilliant but the most sensible, the most
honest, and the most French of the Guises. Henry IV., when seriously ill
at Fontainebleau in 1608, recommended him to Queen Mary de' Medici as one
of the men whom it was most important to call to the councils of state;
and, at the approach of death, Mayenne, weary and weak in the lap of
repose, could conscientiously address those who were around him in such
grand and Christian language as this: "It is no new thing to know that I
must die; for twelve years past my lingering and painful life has been
for the most part an apprenticeship thereto. My sufferings have so
dulled the sting of death that I rather count upon it than dread it;
happy to have had so long a delay to teach me to make a good end, and to
rid me of the things which formerly kept me from that knowledge. Happy
to meet my end amongst mine own people and to terminate by a peaceful
death the sufferings and miseries of my life. I formerly sought death
amidst arms; but I am better pleased, for my soul's salvation, to meet it
and embrace it on my bed than if I had encountered it in battle, for the
sake of the glory of the world."

Let, us return to Henry IV. Since his declaration of war against Philip
II. he had gained much ground. He had fought gloriously, in his own
person, and beaten the Spaniards at Fontaine-Francaise. He had obtained
from Pope Clement VIII. the complete and solemn absolution which had been
refused to him the year before. Mayenne had submitted to him, and that
submission had been death to the League. Some military reverses were
intermingled with these political successes. Between the 25th of June,
1595, and the 10th of March, 1597, the Spanish armies took, in Picardy
and Artois, Le Catelet, Doullens, Cambrai, Ardres, Ham, Guines and two
towns of more importance, Calais, still the object of English ambition
and of offers on the part of Queen Elizabeth to any one who could hand it
over to her, and Amiens, one of the keys to France on the frontier of the
north. These checks were not without compensation. Henry invested and
took the strong place of La Fere; and he retook Amiens after a six
months' struggle. A Spanish plot for getting possession of Marseilles
failed; the young Duke of Guise, whom Henry had made governor of