f Mucio, the
Duchess of Montpensier, carried the scissors at her girdle, with which
she threatened to provide Henry with a third crown, in addition to those
of France and Poland, which he had disgraced--the coronal tonsure of a
monk. The convent should be, it was intimated, the eventual fate of the
modern Childeric, but meantime it was more important than ever to
supersede the ultimate pretensions of Henry of Navarre. To prevent that
heretic of heretics, who was not to be bought with Spanish gold, from
ever reigning, was the first object of Philip and Mucio.

Accordingly, on the last day of the year 1584, a secret treaty had been
signed at Joinville between Henry of Guise and his brother the Duc de
Mayenne, holding the proxies of their brother the Cardinal and those of
their uncles, Aumale and Elbeuf, on the one part, and John Baptist Tassis
and Commander Moreo, on the other, as representatives of Philip. This
transaction, sufficiently well known now to the most superficial student
of history, was a profound mystery then, so far as regarded the action of
the Spanish king. It was not a secret, however, that the papistical party
did not intend that the Bearnese prince should ever come to the throne,
and the matter of the succession was discussed, precisely as if the
throne had been vacant.

It was decided that Charles, paternal uncle to Henry of Navarre, commonly
called the Cardinal Bourbon, should be considered successor to the crown,
in place of Henry, whose claim was forfeited by heresy. Moreover, a great
deal of superfluous money and learning was expended in ordering some
elaborate legal arguments to be prepared by venal jurisconsults, proving
not only that the uncle ought to succeed before the nephew, but that
neither the one nor the other had any claim to succeed at all. The pea
having thus been employed to do the work which the sword alone could
accomplish, the poor old Cardinal was now formally established by the
Guise faction as presumptive heir to the crown.

A man of straw, a superannuated court-dangler, a credulous trifler, but
an earnest Papist as his brother Antony had been, sixty-six years old,
and feeble beyond his years, who, his life long, had never achieved one
manly action, and had now one foot in the grave; this was the puppet
placed in the saddle to run a tilt against the Bearnese, the man with
foot ever in the stirrup, with sword rarely in its sheath.

The contracting parties at Joinville agreed