who governed it withdrew their
attention for an instant from their private schemes of advancement and
plunder to cast a glance at affairs of State. In their secret heart they
could not doubt that France was rushing on its ruin, and that in the
alliance of the Dutch commonwealth, Britain, and the German Protestants,
was its only safety. But they trembled before the Pope, grown bold and
formidable since the death of the dreaded Henry. To offend his Holiness,
the King of Spain, the Emperor, and the great Catholics of France, was to
make a crusade against the Church. Garnier, the Jesuit, preached from his
pulpit that "to strike a blow in the Cleve enterprise was no less a sin
than to inflict a stab in the body of our Lord." The Parliament of Paris
having ordered the famous treatise of the Jesuit Mariana--justifying the
killing of excommunicated kings by their subjects--to be publicly burned
before Notre Dame, the Bishop opposed the execution of the decree. The
Parliament of Paris, although crushed by Epernon in its attempts to fix
the murder of the King upon himself as the true culprit, was at least
strong enough to carry out this sentence upon a printed, volume
recommending the deed, and the Queen's council could only do its best to
mitigate the awakened wrath of the Jesuits at this exercise of legal
authority.--At the same time, it found on the whole so many more
difficulties in a cynical and shameless withdrawal from the Treaty of
Hall than in a nominal and tardy fulfilment of its conditions that it
resolved at last to furnish the 8000 foot and 2000 horse promised to the
possessory princes. The next best thing to abandoning entirely even this
little shred, this pitiful remnant, of the splendid designs of Henry was
to so arrange matters that the contingent should be feebly commanded, and
set on foot in so dilatory a manner that the petty enterprise should on
the part of France be purely perfunctory. The grandees of the kingdom had
something more important to do than to go crusading in Germany, with the
help of a heretic republic, to set up the possessory princes. They were
fighting over the prostrate dying form of their common mother for their
share of the spoils, stripping France before she was dead, and casting
lots for her vesture.

Soissons was on the whole in favour of the Cleve expedition. Epernon was
desperately opposed to it, and maltreated Villeroy in full council when
he affected to say a word, insincere as the D