daughter of
Henry II., he was now fully bent upon making his own without further loss
of time. England, in consequence of the mishap of the year eighty-eight,
he was inclined to defer appropriating until the possession of the French
coasts, together with those of the Netherlands, should enable him to risk
the adventure with assured chances of success.

The Netherlands were fast slipping beyond his control, to be sure, as he
engaged in these endless schemes; and ill-disposed people of the day said
that the king was like Aesop's dog, lapping the river dry in order to get
at the skins floating on the surface. The Duke of Parma was driven to his
wits' ends for expedients, and beside himself with vexation, when
commanded to withdraw his ill-paid and mutinous army from the Provinces
for the purpose of invading France. Most importunate were the appeals and
potent the arguments by which he attempted to turn Philip from his
purpose. It was in vain. Spain was the great, aggressive, overshadowing
power at that day, before whose plots and whose violence the nations
alternately trembled, and it was France that now stood in danger of being
conquered or dismembered by the common enemy of all. That unhappy
kingdom, torn by intestine conflict, naturally invited the ambition and
the greediness of foreign powers. Civil war had been its condition, with
brief intervals, for a whole generation of mankind. During the last few
years, the sword had been never sheathed, while "the holy Confederacy"
and the Bearnese struggled together for the mastery. Religion was the
mantle under which the chiefs on both sides concealed their real designs
as they led on their followers year after year to the desperate conflict.
And their followers, the masses, were doubtless in earnest. A great
principle--the relation of man to his Maker and his condition in a future
world as laid down by rival priesthoods--has in almost every stage of
history had power to influence the multitude to fury and to deluge the
world in blood. And so long as the superstitious element of human nature
enables individuals or combinations of them to dictate to their
fellow-creatures those relations, or to dogmatize concerning those
conditions--to take possession of their consciences in short, and to
interpose their mummeries between man and his Creator--it is, probable
that such scenes as caused the nations to shudder, throughout so large a
portion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuri