human degradation. Let us see
whether the execution was consonant with the inordinate plotting; whether
the price in money and blood--and certainly few human beings have
squandered so much of either as did Philip the Prudent in his long
career--was high or low for the work achieved.

Were after generations to learn, only after curious research, of a
pretender who once called himself, to the amusement of his
contemporaries, Henry the Fourth of France; or was the world-empire for
which so many armies were marshalled, so many ducats expended, so many
falsehoods told, to prove a bubble after all? Time was to show. Meantime
wise men of the day who, like the sages of every generation, read the
future like a printed scroll, were pitying the delusion and rebuking the
wickedness of Henry the Bearnese; persisting as he did in his cruel,
sanguinary, hopeless attempt to establish a vanished and impossible
authority over a land distracted by civil war.

Nothing could be calmer or more reasonable than the language of the great
champion of the Inquisition.

"And as President Jeannin informs me," he said, "that the Catholics have
the intention of electing me king, that appearing to them the gentlest
and safest method to smooth all rivalries likely to arise among the
princes aspiring to the crown, I reply, as you will see by the copy
herewith sent. You will observe that after not refusing myself to that
which may be the will of our Lord, should there be no other mode of
serving Him, above all I desire that which concerns my daughter, since to
her belongs the kingdom. I desire nothing else nor anything for myself,
nor for anybody else, except as a means for her to arrive at her right."

He had taken particular pains to secure his daughter's right in Brittany,
while the Duchess of Mercoeur, by the secret orders of her husband, had
sent a certain ecclesiastic to Spain to make over the sovereignty of this
province to the Infanta. Philip directed that the utmost secrecy should
be observed in regard to this transaction with the duke and duchess, and
promised the duke, as his reward for these proposed services in
dismembering his country, the government of the province for himself and
his heirs.

For the king was quite determined--in case his efforts to obtain the
crown for himself or for his daughter were unsuccessful--to dismember
France, with the assistance of those eminent Frenchmen who were now so
industriously aiding him in his proj