They were told, of course, to do everything in their power to prevent the election of the Prince of Bearne, “being as he was a heretic, obstinate and confirmed, who had sucked heresy with his mother’s milk.”  The legate was warned that “if the Bearnese should make a show of converting himself, it would be frigid and fabricated.”

If they were asked whom Philip desired for king—­a question which certainly seemed probable under the circumstances—­they were to reply that his foremost wish was to establish the Catholic religion in the kingdom, and that whatever was most conducive to that end would be most agreeable to him.  “As it is however desirable, in order to arrange matters, that you should be informed of everything,” said his Majesty, “it is proper that you should know that I have two kinds of right to all that there is over there.  Firstly, because the crown of France has been usurped from me, my ancestors having been unjustly excluded by foreign occupation of it; and secondly, because I claim the same crown as first male of the house of Valois.”

Here certainly were comprehensive pretensions, and it was obvious that the king’s desire for the establishment of the Catholic religion must have been very lively to enable him to invent or accept such astonishing fictions.

But his own claims were but a portion of the case.  His daughter and possible spouse had rights of her own, hard, in his opinion, to be gainsaid.  “Over and above all this,” said Philip, “my eldest daughter, the Infanta, has two other rights; one to all the states which as dower-property are joined by matrimony and through females to this crown, which now come to her in direct line, and the other to the crown itself, which belongs directly to the said Infanta, the matter of the Salic law being a mere invention.”

Thus it would appear that Philip was the legitimate representative, not only of the ancient races of French monarchs—­whether Merovingians, Carlovingians, or otherwise was not stated but also of the usurping houses themselves, by whose intrusion those earlier dynasties had been ejected, being the eldest male heir of the extinct line of Valois, while his daughter was, if possible, even more legitimately the sovereign and proprietor of France than he was himself.

Nevertheless in his magnanimous desire for the peace of the world and the advancement of the interests of the Church, he was, if reduced to extremities, willing to forego his own individual rights—­when it should appear that they could by no possibility be enforced—­in favour of his daughter and of the husband whom he should select for her.

“Thus it may be seen,” said the self-denying man, “that I know how, for the sake of the public repose, to strip myself of my private property.”