His party—­for he was but the nominal chief of a faction, ’tanquam unus ex nobis’—­was the party in possession—­the office-holders’ party; the spoilsmen, whose purpose was to rob the exchequer and to enrich themselves.  His minions—­for the favourites were called by no other name—­were even more hated, because less despised than the King.  Attired in cloth of gold—­for silk and satin were grown too coarse a material for them—­with their little velvet porringer-caps stuck on the sides of their heads, with their long hair stiff with pomatum, and their heads set inside a well-starched ruff a foot wide, “like St. John’s head in a charger,” as a splenetic contemporary observed, with a nimbus of musk and violet-powder enveloping them as they passed before vulgar mortals, these rapacious and insolent courtiers were the impersonation of extortion and oppression to the Parisian populace.  They were supposed, not unjustly, to pass their lives in dancing, blasphemy, dueling, dicing, and intrigue, in following the King about like hounds, fawning at his feet, and showing their teeth to all besides; and for virtues such as these they were rewarded by the highest offices in church, camp, and state, while new taxes and imposts were invented almost daily to feed their avarice and supply their extravagance.  France, doomed to feel the beak and talons of these harpies in its entrails, impoverished by a government that robbed her at home while it humiliated her abroad, struggled vainly in its misery, and was now on the verge of another series of internecine combats—­civil war seeming the only alternative to a voluptuous and licentious peace.

“We all stood here at gaze,” wrote ambassador Stafford to Walsingham, “looking for some great matter to come of this sudden journey to Lyons; but, as far as men can find, ‘parturient montes’, for there hath been nothing but dancing and banquetting from one house to another, bravery in apparel, glittering like the sun.”  He, mentioned that the Duke of Epernon’s horse, taking fright at a red cloak, had backed over a precipice, breaking his own neck, while his master’s shoulder merely was put out of joint.  At the same time the Duke of Joyeuse, coming over Mount Cenis, on his return from Savoy, had broken his wrist.  The people, he said, would rather they had both broken their necks “than any other joint, the King having racked the nation for their sakes, as he hath-done.”  Stafford expressed much compassion for the French in the plight in which they found themselves.  “Unhappy people!” he cried, “to have such a King, who seeketh nothing but to impoverish them to enrich a couple, and who careth not what cometh after his death, so that he may rove on while he liveth, and careth neither for doing his own estate good nor his neighbour’s state harm.”  Sir Edward added, however, in a philosophizing vein, worthy of Corporal Nym, that, “seeing we cannot be so happy as to have a King to concur with us to do us any good, yet we are happy to have one that his humour serveth him not to concur with others to do us harm; and ’tis a wisdom for us to follow these humours, that we may keep him still in that humour, and from hearkening to others that may egg him on to worse.”