ncessantly laboring to reconcile them,
and to prevent the estates of the League from giving the crown of France
to a Spanish princess. Villeroi was a Leaguer of the patriotically
French type. And so Henry IV., as soon as he was firm upon his throne,
summoned him to his councils, and confided to him the direction of
foreign affairs. The late Leaguer sat beside Sully, and exerted himself
to give the prevalence, in Henry IV.'s external policy, to Catholic
maxims and alliances, whilst Sully, remaining firmly Protestant in the
service of his king turned Catholic, continued to be in foreign matters
the champion of Protestant policy and alliances. There was thus seen,
during the sixteenth century, in the French monarchy, a phenomenon which
was to repeat itself during the eighteenth in the republic of the United
States of America, when, in 1789, its president, Washington, summoned to
his cabinet Hamilton and Jefferson together, one the stanchest of the
aristocratic federalists and the other the warm defender of democratic
principles and tendencies. Washington, in his lofty and calm
impartiality, considered that, to govern the nascent republic, he had
need of both; and he found a way, in fact, to make both of service to
him. Henry IV. had perceived himself to be in an analogous position with
France and Europe divided between Catholics and Protestants, whom he
aspired to pacificate.

He likewise succeeded. An incomplete success, however, as generally.
happens when the point attained is an adjournment of knotty questions
which war has vainly attempted to cut, and the course of ideas and events
has not yet had time to unravel.

Henry IV. made so great a case of Villeroi's co-operation and influence,
that, without loving him as he loved Sully, he upheld him and kept him as
secretary of state for foreign affairs to the end of his reign. He
precisely defined his peculiar merit when he said, "Princes have servants
of all values and all sorts; some do their own business before that of
their master; others do their master's and do not forget their own; but
Villeroi believes that his master's business is his own, and he bestows
thereon the same zeal that another does in pushing his own suit or
laboring at his own vine." Though short and frigidly written, the
Memoires of Villeroi give, in fact, the idea of a man absorbed in his
commission and regarding it as his own business as well as that of his
king and country.

Philip du