And behind the crimes and the frivolities stood the Parliaments, calm and undaunted, with leaders, like Mole and Talon, who needed nothing but success to make their names as grand in history as those of Pym and Hampden.  Among the Brienne Papers in the British Museum there is a collection of the manifestoes and proclamations of that time, and they are earnest, eloquent, and powerful, from beginning to end.  Lord Mahon alone among historians, so far as our knowledge goes, has done fit and full justice to the French parliaments, those assemblies which refused admission to the foreign armies which the nobles would gladly have summoned in,—­but fed and protected the banished princesses of England, when the court party had left those descendants of the Bourbons to die of cold and hunger in the palace of their ancestors.  And we have the testimony of Henrietta Maria herself, the only person who had seen both revolutions near at hand, that “the troubles in England never appeared so formidable in their early days, nor were the leaders of the revolutionary party so ardent or so united.”  The character of the agitation was no more to be judged by its jokes and epigrams, than the gloomy glory of the English Puritans by the grotesque names of their saints, or the stern resolution of the Dutch burghers by their guilds of rhetoric and symbolical melodrama.

But popular power was not yet developed in France, as it was in England; all social order was unsettled and changing, and well Mazarin knew it.  He knew the pieces with which he played his game of chess:  the king powerless, the queen mighty, the bishops unable to take a single straightforward move, and the knights going naturally zigzag; but a host of plebeian pawns, every one fit for a possible royalty, and therefore to be used shrewdly, or else annihilated as soon as practicable.  True, the game would not last forever; but after him the deluge.

Our age has forgotten even the meaning of the word Fronde; but here also the French and Flemish histories run parallel, and the Frondeurs, like the Gueux, were children of a sarcasm.  The Counsellor Bachaumont one day ridiculed insurrectionists, as resembling the boys who played with slings (frondes) about the streets of Paris, but scattered at the first glimpse of a policeman.  The phrase organized the party.  Next morning all fashions were a la fronde,—­hats, gloves, fans, bread, and ballads; and it cost six years of civil war to pay for the Counsellor’s facetiousness.

That which was, after all, the most remarkable characteristic of these wars might be guessed from this fact about the fashions.  The Fronde was preeminently “the War of the Ladies.”  Educated far beyond the Englishwomen of their time, they took a controlling share, sometimes ignoble, as often noble, always powerful, in the affairs of the time.  It was not merely a courtly gallantry which flattered them with a hollow importance.  De Retz, in his Memoirs, compares