have no mind to avenge myself for these outrages, as I might, and as Pope Sixtus V. did when he sent to the galleys certain Cordeliers for having dared to slander him in their sermons.  There is not one of you who has not deserved as much, and more; but it is my good pleasure to forget all, and to pardon you, on condition of its not occurring again.  If it should, I beg my court of Parliament, here present, to exact exemplary justice, and such as the seditious, like you, may take warning by, so as to mind their own business.”  At their exit after this address, the Parliament and the Sorbonne, being quite sure that the king would not carry the matter further, withdrew smiling, and saying, “He certainly has spirit, but not enough of it” (habet quidem animum, sed non satis animi).  The Duke of Guise’s sister, the Duchess of Montpensier, took to getting up and spreading about all sorts of pamphlets against the king and his government.  “The king commanded her to quit his city of Paris; she did nothing of the kind; and three days after she was even brazen enough to say that she carried at her waist the scissors which would give a third crown to brother Henry de Valois.”  At the close of 1587, the Duke of Guise made a trip to Rome, “with a suite of five; and he only remained three days, so disguised that he was not recognized there, and discovered himself to nobody but Cardinal Pelleve, with whom he was in communication day and night.” [Journal de L’Estoile, t. i. p. 345.] Eighteen months previously, the cardinal had given a very favorable reception to a case drawn up by an advocate in the Parliament of Paris, named David, who maintained that, “although the line of the Capets had succeeded to the temporal administration of the kingdom of Charlemagne, it had not succeeded to the apostolic benediction, which appertained to none but the posterity of the said Charlemagne, and that, the line of Capet being some of them possessed by a spirit of giddiness and stupidity, and others heretic and excommunicated, the time had come for restoring the crown to the true heirs,” that is to say, to the house of Lorraine, which claimed to be issue of Charlemagne.  This case was passed on, it is said, from Rome to Philip II., King of Spain, and M. de Saint-Goard, ambassador of France at Madrid, sent Henry III. a copy of it. [Memoires de la Ligue, t. i. pp. 1-7.]

Whatever may have been the truth about this trip to Rome on the part of the Duke of Guise, and its influence upon what followed, the chiefs of the Leaguers resolved to deal a great blow.  The Lorraine princes and their intimate associates met at Nancy in January, 1588, and decided that a petition should be presented to the king; that he should be called upon to join himself more openly and in good earnest to the League, and to remove from offices of consequence all the persons that should be pointed out to him; that the Holy Inquisition should be established, at any rate