he
friendly Cardinal's advice, kept his hand from German marriages and his
feet from conventicles--had he assisted his sovereign in burning heretics
and hunting rebels, it would not then have become necessary "to treat him
like a Turk." This is unquestionable. It is equally so that there would
have been one great lamp the less in that strait and difficult pathway
which leads to the temple of true glory.

The main reliance of Orange was upon the secret negotiations which his
brother Louis was then renewing with the French government. The Prince
had felt an almost insurmountable repugnance towards entertaining any
relation with that blood-stained court, since the massacre of Saint
Bartholomew. But a new face had recently been put upon that transaction.
Instead of glorying, in their crime, the King and his mother now assumed
a tone of compunction, and averred that the deed had been unpremeditated;
that it had been the result of a panic or an ecstasy of fear inspired by
the suddenly discovered designs of the Huguenots; and that, in the
instinct of self-preservation, the King, with his family and immediate
friends, had plunged into a crime which they now bitterly lamented. The
French envoys at the different courts of Europe were directed to impress
this view upon the minds of the monarchs to whom they were accredited. It
was certainly a very different instruction from that which they had at
first received. Their cue had originally been to claim a full meed of
praise and thanksgiving in behalf of their sovereign for his meritorious
exploit. The salvos of artillery, the illuminations and rejoicings, the
solemn processions and masses by which the auspicious event had been
celebrated, mere yet fresh in the memory of men. The ambassadors were
sufficiently embarrassed by the distinct and determined approbation which
they had recently expressed. Although the King, by formal proclamation,
had assumed the whole responsibility, as he had notoriously been one of
the chief perpetrators of the deed, his agents were now to stultify
themselves and their monarch by representing, as a deplorable act of
frenzy, the massacre which they had already extolled to the echo as a
skilfully executed and entirely commendable achievement.

To humble the power of Spain, to obtain the hand of Queen Elizabeth for
the Duke d'Alencon, to establish an insidious kind of protectorate over
the Protestant princes of Germany, to obtain the throne of Poland for the