e controversy, besides, has an interest of
its own, in view of later controversies.

John Knox, from 1556 to 1559, was resident in Geneva, as minister,
jointly with Goodman, of a little church of English refugees. He and his
congregation were banished from England by one woman, Mary Tudor, and
proscribed in Scotland by another, the Regent Mary of Guise. The
coincidence was tempting; here were many abuses centring about one
abuse; here was Christ's Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one
anomalous power. He had not far to go to find the idea that female
government was anomalous. It was an age, indeed, in which women, capable
and incapable, played a conspicuous part upon the stage of European
history; and yet their rule, whatever may have been the opinion of here
and there a wise man or enthusiast, was regarded as an anomaly by the
great bulk of their contemporaries. It was defended as an anomaly. It,
and all that accompanied and sanctioned it, was set aside as a single
exception; and no one thought of reasoning down from queens and
extending their privileges to ordinary women. Great ladies, as we know,
had the privilege of entering into monasteries and cloisters, otherwise
forbidden to their sex. As with one thing, so with another. Thus,
Margaret of Navarre wrote books with great acclamation, and no one,
seemingly, saw fit to call her conduct in question; but Mademoiselle de
Gournay, Montaigne's adopted daughter, was in a controversy with the
world as to whether a woman might be an author without incongruity.
Thus, too, we have Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigne writing to his daughters
about the learned women of his century, and cautioning them, in
conclusion, that the study of letters was unsuited to ladies of a
middling station, and should be reserved for princesses.[63] And once
more, if we desire to see the same principle carried to ludicrous
extreme, we shall find that Reverend Father in God, the Abbot of
Brantome, claiming, on the authority of some lord of his acquaintance, a
privilege, or rather a duty, of free love for great princesses, and
carefully excluding other ladies from the same gallant dispensation.[64]
One sees the spirit in which these immunities were granted; and how they
were but the natural consequence of that awe for courts and kings that
made the last writer tell us, with simple wonder, how Catherine de
Medici would "laugh her fill just like another" over the humours of
pantaloons and zanies. And su