“I will so bridle the popes,” said he, cheerfully, “that they will never pass my restrictions.  My children will be still more virtuous and valiant than I. If I have none, then the devil take the hindmost.  Nevertheless I choose that the council shall be enacted.  I desire it more ardently than I pressed the edict for the Protestants.”  Such being the royal humour at the moment, it may well be believed that Duplessis Mornay would find but little sunshine from on high on the occasion of his famous but forgotten conferences with Du Perron, now archbishop of Evreux, before the king and all the court at Fontainebleau.  It was natural enough that to please the king the king’s old Huguenot friend should be convicted of false citations from the fathers; but it would seem strange, were the motives unknown, that Henry should have been so intensely interested in this most arid and dismal of theological controversies.  Yet those who had known and observed the king closely for thirty years, declared that he had never manifested so much passion, neither on the eve of battles nor of amorous assignations, as he then did for the demolition of Duplessis and his deductions.  He had promised the Nuncius that the Huguenot should be utterly confounded, and with him the whole fraternity, “for,” said the king, “he has wickedly and impudently written against the pope, to whom I owe as much as I do to God.”

These were not times in which the Hollanders, battling as stoutly against Spain and the pope as they had done during the years when the republic stood shoulder to shoulder with Henry the Huguenot, could hope for aid and comfort from their ancient ally.

It is very characteristic of that age of dissimulation and of reckless political gambling, that at the very moment when Henry’s marriage with Marie de Medicis was already arranged, and when that princess was soon expected in Lyons, a cabal at the king’s court was busy with absurd projects to marry their sovereign to the Infanta of Spain.  It is true that the Infanta was already the wife of the cardinal-archduke, but it was thought possible—­for reasons divulged through the indiscretions or inventions of the father confessor—­to obtain the pope’s dispensation on the ground of the nullity of the marriage.  Thus there were politicians at the French court seriously occupied in an attempt to deprive the archduke of his wife, of his Netherland provinces, and of the crown of, the holy Roman empire, which he still hoped to inherit.  Yet the ink was scarcely dry with which Henry had signed the treaty of amity with Madrid and Brussels.

The Queen of England, on the other hand—­although often listening to secret agents from Brussels and Madrid who offered peace, and although perfectly aware that the great abject of Spain in securing peace with England was to be able to swoop down at once upon the republic, thus deprived of any allies was beside herself with rage, whenever she suspected, with or without reason, that Brussels or Madrid had been sending peace emissaries to the republic.