only the chief pilot. The civil wars of France lasted longer, were more
cruel, and productive of greater evils than those of England; but none of
these civil wars had a wise and prudent liberty for their object.

In the detestable reigns of Charles IX. and Henry III. the whole affair
was only whether the people should be slaves to the Guises. With regard
to the last war of Paris, it deserves only to be hooted at. Methinks I
see a crowd of schoolboys rising up in arms against their master, and
afterwards whipped for it. Cardinal de Retz, who was witty and brave
(but to no purpose), rebellious without a cause, factious without design,
and head of a defenceless party, caballed for caballing sake, and seemed
to foment the civil war merely out of diversion. The Parliament did not
know what he intended, nor what he did not intend. He levied troops by
Act of Parliament, and the next moment cashiered them. He threatened, he
begged pardon; he set a price upon Cardinal Mazarin's head, and
afterwards congratulated him in a public manner. Our civil wars under
Charles VI. were bloody and cruel, those of the League execrable, and
that of the Frondeurs ridiculous.

That for which the French chiefly reproach the English nation is the
murder of King Charles I., whom his subjects treated exactly as he would
have treated them had his reign been prosperous. After all, consider on
one side Charles I., defeated in a pitched battle, imprisoned, tried,
sentenced to die in Westminster Hall, and then beheaded. And on the
other, the Emperor Henry VII., poisoned by his chaplain at his receiving
the Sacrament; Henry III. stabbed by a monk; thirty assassinations
projected against Henry IV., several of them put in execution, and the
last bereaving that great monarch of his life. Weigh, I say, all these
wicked attempts, and then judge.