The horrors of the succeeding administration proved beneficial to her reputation.  Upon the dark ground of succeeding years the lines which recorded her history seemed written with letters of light.  Yet her conduct in the Netherlands offers but few points for approbation, and many for indignant censure.  That she was not entirely destitute of feminine softness and sentiments of bounty, her parting despatch to her brother proved.  In that letter she recommended to him a course of clemency and forgiveness, and reminded him that the nearer kings approach to God in station, the more they should endeavor to imitate him in his attributes of benignity.  But the language of this farewell was more tender than had been the spirit of her government.  One looks in vain, too, through the general atmosphere of kindness which pervades the epistle; for a special recommendation of those distinguished and doomed seigniors, whose attachment to her person and whose chivalrous and conscientious endeavors to fulfil her own orders, had placed them upon the edge of that precipice from which they were shortly to be hurled.  The men who had restrained her from covering herself with disgrace by a precipitate retreat from the post of danger, and who had imperilled their lives by obedience to her express instructions, had been long languishing in solitary confinement, never to be terminated except by a traitor’s death—­yet we search in vain for a kind word in their behalf.

Meantime the second civil war in France had broken out.  The hollow truce by which the Guise party and the Huguenots had partly pretended to deceive each other was hastened to its end; among other causes, by the march of Alva, to the Netherlands.  The Huguenots had taken alarm, for they recognized the fellowship which united their foes in all countries against the Reformation, and Conde and Coligny knew too well that the same influence which had brought Alva to Brussels would soon create an exterminating army against their followers.  Hostilities were resumed with more bitterness than ever.  The battle of St. Denis—­fierce, fatal, but indecisive—­was fought.  The octogenarian hero, Montmorency, fighting like a foot soldier, refusing to yield his sword, and replying to the respectful solicitations of his nearest enemy by dashing his teeth down his throat with the butt-end of his pistol, the hero of so many battles, whose defeat at St. Quintin had been the fatal point in his career, had died at last in his armor, bravely but not gloriously, in conflict with his own countrymen, led by his own heroic nephew.  The military control of the Catholic party was completely in the hand of the Guises; the Chancellor de l’Hopital had abandoned the court after a last and futile effort to reconcile contending factions, which no human power could unite; the Huguenots had possessed themselves of Rochelle and of other strong places, and, under the guidance of adroit statesmen and accomplished generals, were pressing the Most Christian monarch hard in the very heart of his kingdom.