no lover of Henry, and lived in
mortal fear of Philip, while it must be conceded that the Spanish
ambassador at Rome was much given to brow-beating his Holiness. Should he
dare to grant that absolution which was the secret object of the
Bearnese, there was no vengeance, hinted the envoy, that Philip would not
wreak on the holy father. He would cut off his supplies from Naples and
Sicily, and starve him and all-his subjects; he would frustrate all his
family schemes, he would renounce him, he would unpope him, he would do
anything that man and despot could do, should the great shepherd dare to
re-admit this lost sheep, and this very black sheep, into the fold of the
faithful.

As for Henry himself, his game--for in his eyes it was nothing but a
game--lay every day plainer and plainer before him. He was indispensable
to the heretics. Neither England, nor Holland, nor Protestant Germany,
could renounce him, even should he renounce "the religion." Nor could the
French Huguenots exist without that protection which, even although
Catholic, he could still extend to them when he should be accepted as
king by the Catholics.

Hereditary monarch by French law and history, released from his heresy by
the authority that could bind and loose, purged as with hyssop and washed
whiter than snow, it should go hard with him if Philip, and Farnese, and
Mayenne, and all the pikemen and reiters they might muster, could keep
him very long from the throne of his ancestors.

Nothing could match the ingenuousness with which he demanded the
instruction whenever the fitting time for it should arrive; as if,
instead of having been a professor both of the Calvinist and Catholic
persuasion, and having relapsed from both, he had been some innocent
Peruvian or Hindoo, who was invited to listen to preachings and to
examine dogmas for the very first time in his life.

Yet Philip had good grounds for hoping a favourable result from his
political and military manoeuvre. He entertained little doubt that France
belonged to him or to his daughter; that the most powerful party in the
country was in favour of his claims, provided he would pay the voters
liberally enough for their support, and that if the worst came to the
worst it would always be in his power to dismember the kingdom, and to
reserve the lion's share for himself, while distributing some of the
provinces to the most prominent of his confederates.

The sixteen tyrants of Paris had already, a