igning only seventeen months. At this point,
Catherine enters upon the scene of action. Jealous of Mary Stuart
and fearing that the young king, Charles IX., then but ten years old,
might become infatuated with her and marry her, she promptly returned
the fair young woman to Scotland.

The task before the regent was no light one; her kingdom was
divided against itself, the country was overburdened with taxes, and
discontent reigned universally. All who surrounded her were full of
prejudice and actuated solely by personal aspirations--she realized
that she could trust no one.

Her first act of a political nature was to rescue the house of
Valois and solidify the royal authority. Some critics maintain that
she began her reign with moderation, gentleness, impartiality, and
reconciliation. This view finds support in the fact that during the
first years she favored Protestantism; finding, however, that the
latter was weakening royal power and that the country at large was
opposed to it, she became its most bitter enemy. To the Protestants
and their plottings she attributed all the disastrous effects of the
civil war, all thefts, murders, incests, and adulteries, as well
as the profanation of the sepulchres of the ancestors of the royal
family, the burning of the bones of Louis XI. and of the heart of
Francis II.

The Machiavellian policy was Catherine's guide; bitter experience had
robbed her of all faith in humanity--she had learned to despise it
and the judgment of her contemporaries. At first she was amiable and
polite, seemingly intent upon pleasing those with whom she talked;
in fact, it is said that she was then more often accused of excessive
mildness and moderation than of the violence and cruelty which later
characterized her. Experience having taught her how to deal with
people, she never lost her self-control.

Subsequent history shows that any gentle and conciliatory policy of
Catherine was merely a method of furthering her own interests, and
was therefore not the outcome of any inborn feeling of sympathy or
womanly tenderness. Whether her signing of the Edict of Saint-Germain,
admitting the Protestants to all employments and granting them the
privilege of Calvinistic worship in two cities of every province, and
her refusal, upon the urgent solicitations of her son-in-law, Philip
II., to persecute heretics were really snares laid for the Huguenots,
is a matter which historians have not decided.

Inasmuch as