of the other cardinals and prelates, whose habits
are too scandalously irregular. But his great defect is shameful
cupidity, which would employ, to attain its ends, even criminal means,
and likewise great duplicity, whence comes his habit of scarcely ever
saying that which is. There is worse behind. He is considered to be
very ready to take offence, vindictive, envious, and far too slow in
benefaction. He excited universal hatred by hurting all the world as
long as it was in his power to. As for Mgr. de Guise, who is the eldest
of the six brothers, he cannot be spoken of save as a man of war, a good
officer. None in this realm has delivered more battles and confronted
more dangers. Everybody lauds his courage, his vigilance, his steadiness
in war, and his coolness, a quality wonderfully rare in a Frenchman. His
peculiar defects are, first of all, stinginess towards soldiers; then he
makes large promises, and even when he means to keep his promise he is
infinitely slow about it."

To the sketch of the Cardinal of Lorraine Brantome adds that he was,
"as indeed he said, a coward by nature." a strange defect in a Guise.

It was a great deal, towards securing the supremacy of a great family
and its leading members, to thus possess the favor of the court and the
functions of government; but the power of the Guises had a still higher
origin and a still deeper foundation. "It was then," said Michael de
Castelnau, one of the most intelligent and most impartial amongst the
chroniclers of the sixteenth century, "that schism and divisions in
religious matters began to be mixed up with affairs of state. Well, all
the clergy of France, and nearly all the noblesse and the people who
belonged to the Roman religion, considered that the Cardinal of Lorraine
and the Duke of Guise were, as it were, called of God to preserve the
Catholic religion established in France for the last twelve hundred
years. And it seemed to them not only an act of impiety to change or
alter it in any way whatever, but also an impossibility to do so without
ruin to the state. The late king, Henry, had made a decree in the month
of June, 1559, being then at Ecouen, by which the judges were bound to
sentence all Lutherans to death, and which was published and confirmed by
all the Parliaments, without any limitation or modification whatever, and
with a warning to the judges not to mitigate the penalty, as they had
done for some years previously. Differ