bind and loose, purged as with hyssop and washed
whiter than snow, it should go hard with him if Philip, and Farnese, and
Mayenne, and all the pikemen and reiters they might muster, could keep
him very long from the throne of his ancestors.

Nothing could match the ingenuousness with which he demanded the
instruction whenever the fitting time for it should arrive; as if,
instead of having been a professor both of the Calvinist and Catholic
persuasion, and having relapsed from both, he had been some innocent
Peruvian or Hindoo, who was invited to listen to preachings and to
examine dogmas for the very first time in his life.

Yet Philip had good grounds for hoping a favourable result from his
political and military manoeuvre. He entertained little doubt that France
belonged to him or to his daughter; that the most powerful party in the
country was in favour of his claims, provided he would pay the voters
liberally enough for their support, and that if the worst came to the
worst it would always be in his power to dismember the kingdom, and to
reserve the lion's share for himself, while distributing some of the
provinces to the most prominent of his confederates.

The sixteen tyrants of Paris had already, as we have seen, urged the
crown upon him, provided he would establish in France the Inquisition,
the council of Trent, and other acceptable institutions, besides
distributing judiciously a good many lucrative offices among various
classes of his adherents.

The Duke of Mayenne, in his own name and that of all the Catholics of
France, formally demanded of him to maintain two armies, forty thousand
men in all, to be respectively under command of the duke himself and of
Alexander Farnese, and regularly to pay for them. These propositions, as
has been seen, were carried into effect as nearly as possible, at
enormous expense to Philip's exchequer, and he naturally expected as good
faith on the part of Mayenne.

In the same paper in which the demand was made Philip was urged to
declare himself king of France. He was assured that the measure could be
accomplished "by freely bestowing marquisates, baronies, and peerages, in
order to content the avarice and ambition of many persons, without at the
same time dissipating the greatness from which all these members
depended. Pepin and Charlemagne," said the memorialists, "who were
foreigners and Saxons by nation, did as much in order to get possession
of a kingdom to which they