a great historical figure presented itself
to the world so bizarre of aspect, and under such shifting perplexity of
light and shade, as did the Bearnese in the early spring of 1590.

The hope of a considerable portion of the catholic nobility of his realm,
although himself an excommunicated heretic; the mainstay of Calvinism
while secretly bending all his energies to effect his reconciliation with
the pope; the idol of the austere and grimly puritanical, while himself a
model of profligacy; the leader of the earnest and the true, although
false as water himself in every relation in which human beings can stand
to each other; a standardbearer of both great branches of the Christian
Church in an age when religion was the atmosphere of men's daily lives,
yet finding his sincerest admirer, and one of his most faithful allies,
in the Grand Turk,

[A portion of the magnificently protective letter of Sultan Amurath,
in which he complimented Henry on his religious stedfastness, might
almost have made the king's cheek tingle.]

the representative of national liberty and human rights against regal and
sacerdotal absolutism, while himself a remorseless despot by nature and
education, and a believer in no rights of the people save in their
privilege to be ruled by himself; it seems strange at first view that
Henry of Navarre should have been for centuries so heroic and popular an
image. But he was a soldier, a wit, a consummate politician; above all,
he was a man, at a period when to be a king was often to be something
much less or much worse.

To those accustomed to weigh and analyse popular forces it might well
seem that he was now playing an utterly hopeless game. His capital
garrisoned by the Pope and the King of Spain, with its grandees and its
populace scoffing at his pretence of authority and loathing his name;
with an exchequer consisting of what he could beg or borrow from Queen
Elizabeth--most parsimonious of sovereigns reigning over the half of a
small island--and from the States-General governing a half-born,
half-drowned little republic, engaged in a quarter of a century's warfare
with the greatest monarch in the world; with a wardrobe consisting of a
dozen shirts and five pocket-handkerchiefs, most of them ragged, and with
a commissariat made up of what could be brought in the saddle-bags of his
Huguenot cavaliers who came to the charge with him to-day, and to-morrow
were dispersed again to their mountain