“But what I most feel,” said Alexander, with honest wrath, “is to see that your Majesty gives ear to them without making the demonstration which my services merit, and has not sent to inform me of them, seeing that they may involve my reputation and honour.  People have made more account of these calumnies than of my actions performed upon the theatre of the world.  I complain, after all my toils and dangers in your Majesty’s service, just when I stood with my soul in my mouth and death in my teeth, forgetting children, house, and friends, to be treated thus, instead of receiving rewards and honour, and being enabled to leave to my children, what was better than all the riches the royal hand could bestow, an unsullied and honourable name.”

He protested that his reputation had so much suffered that he would prefer to retire to some remote corner as a humble servant of the king, and leave a post which had made him so odious to all.  Above all, he entreated his Majesty to look upon this whole affair “not only like a king but like a gentleman.”

Philip answered these complaints and reproaches benignantly, expressed unbounded confidence in the duke, assured him that the calumnies of his supposed enemies could produce no effect upon the royal mind, and coolly professed to have entirely forgotten having received any such letter as that of which his nephew complained.  “At any rate I have mislaid it,” he said, “so that you see how much account it was with me.”

As the king was in the habit of receiving such letters every week, not only from the commander, since deceased, but from Ybarra and others, his memory, to say the least, seemed to have grown remarkably feeble.  But the sequel will very soon show that he had kept the letters by him and pondered them to much purpose.  To expect frankness and sincerity from him, however, even in his most intimate communications to his most trusted servants, would have been to “swim with fins of lead.”

Such being the private relations between the conspirators, it is instructive to observe how they dealt with each other in the great game they were playing for the first throne in Christendom.  The military events have been sufficiently sketched in the preceding pages, but the meaning and motives of public affairs can be best understood by occasional glances behind the scenes.  It is well for those who would maintain their faith in popular Governments to study the workings of the secret, irresponsible, arbitrary system; for every Government, as every individual, must be judged at last by those moral laws which no man born of woman can evade.

During the first French expedition-in the course of which Farnese had saved Paris from falling into, the hands of Henry, and had been doing his best to convert it prospectively into the capital of his master’s empire--it was his duty, of course, to represent as accurately as possible the true state of France.  He submitted his actions to his master’s will, but he never withheld from him the advantage that he might have derived, had he so chosen, from his nephew’s luminous intelligence and patient observation.