nothing for us, for all its cabals tend to close union
with Rome, whence we can expect nothing but foul weather.
The king alone has any memory of our past services.”
But imperturbable and self-confident as ever, Henry
troubled himself little with fears in regard to the
papal supremacy, even when his Parliament professed
great anxiety in regard to the consequences of the
Council of Trent, if not under him yet under his successors.
“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.