Catherine de’ Medici, on the contrary, saved the crown of France; she maintained the royal authority in the midst of circumstances under which more than one great prince would have succumbed.  Having to make head against factions and ambitions like those of the Guises and the house of Bourbon, against men such as the two Cardinals of Lorraine, the two Balafres, and the two Condes, against the queen Jeanne d’Albret, Henri IV., the Connetable de Montmorency, Calvin, the three Colignys, Theodore de Beze, she needed to possess and to display the rare qualities and precious gifts of a statesman under the mocking fire of the Calvinist press.

Those facts are incontestable.  Therefore, to whosoever burrows into the history of the sixteenth century in France, the figure of Catherine de’ Medici will seem like that of a great king.  When calumny is once dissipated by facts, recovered with difficulty from among the contradictions of pamphlets and false anecdotes, all explains itself to the fame of this extraordinary woman, who had none of the weaknesses of her sex, who lived chaste amid the license of the most dissolute court in Europe, and who, in spite of her lack of money, erected noble public buildings, as if to repair the loss caused by the iconoclasms of the Calvinists, who did as much harm to art as to the body politic.  Hemmed in between the Guises who claimed to be the heirs of Charlemagne and the factious younger branch who sought to screen the treachery of the Connetable de Bourbon behind the throne, Catherine, forced to combat heresy which was seeking to annihilate the monarchy, without friends, aware of treachery among the leaders of the Catholic party, foreseeing a republic in the Calvinist party, Catherine employed the most dangerous but the surest weapon of public policy,—­craft.  She resolved to trick and so defeat, successively, the Guises who were seeking the ruin of the house of Valois, the Bourbons who sought the crown, and the Reformers (the Radicals of those days) who dreamed of an impossible republic—­like those of our time; who have, however, nothing to reform.  Consequently, so long as she lived, the Valois kept the throne of France.  The great historian of that time, de Thou, knew well the value of this woman when, on hearing of her death, he exclaimed:  “It is not a woman, it is monarchy itself that has died!”

Catherine had, in the highest degree, the sense of royalty, and she defended it with admirable courage and persistency.  The reproaches which Calvinist writers have cast upon her are to her glory; she incurred them by reason only of her triumphs.  Could she, placed as she was, triumph otherwise than by craft?  The whole question lies there.