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,