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When we read of Mary's irresistible charm, of her audacity, her cunning, her genius for diplomacy and statecraft, far exceeding Elizabeth's when we read of all this and think of the blood of the Guises in her veins, and the precepts of Catharine de Medici in her heart, we realize what her usurpation would have meant for England, and feel that she was a menace to the State, and justly incurred her fate.
But the gnawing of grief till it becomes a physical pain, the fever fits of sorrow, the aching desiderium, bring back in many guises the old questions. These require new attempts at answers, and are answered, "the sad mechanic exercise" of verse allaying the pain.
"Yes." "You saw my mortal enemy here, and did not tell me?" "I am not a spy. Then there are the Guises; 20,000 or 25,000 men under the orders of the Duc de Guise will make up altogether a nice little army." "But Henri of Navarre and the Duc de Guise are enemies." "Which will not prevent them from uniting against you; they will be free to fight with each other when they have conquered you."
As regarded the Guises, who affected at this juncture a perfect equality with the house of Bourbon, their eagerness to hold office defeated its own object, the Duc de Mayenne and the Duc de Guise equally declaring their right to assist in the government of the kingdom; while it was considered as incompatible with the interests of the Crown that two members of the same family should be admitted into so important an assembly.
There he told the Connetable de Montmorency of the peril of his nephew, the Prince de Conde, and the audacious hopes of the Guises. The Connetable, furious at the thought that the prince's life hung upon that of Francois II., started for Orleans at once with a hundred noblemen and fifteen hundred cavalry.
The uncle Guises were stipendiaries of Philip, Philip was the slave of the Pope. Mucio had frightened the unlucky Henry III. into submission, and there was no health nor hope in France. For England, Mary Stuart embodied the possible relapse into sloth, dependence, barbarism. For Elizabeth, Mary Stuart embodied sedition, conspiracy, rebellion, battle, murder, and sudden death.
It was no wonder that the royal pair did not ratify a Protestant Confession, for during their brief reign over France they were the centre of a keen crusade against Protestantism, conducted far more by Mary's counsellors and uncles, the Guises, than by her feeble-minded husband.
The Guises were loath to surrender power without a struggle, and as soon as Francis died they sought to sell their niece in marriage again. Their first idea was for her to marry her child-brother-in-law, the new King Charles IX., but Catharine de Medici at once stopped that plan, though the boy himself was anxious for it and Mary was not averse.
The widowhood of Mary Stuart freed him from his dread of a permanent annexation of Scotland by France as well as of a French annexation of England, while the need of holding England as a check on French hostility to the House of Austria grew weaker as the outbreak of civil war between the Guises and their opponents rendered French hostility less possible.
They assumed various guises, and though they employed all their cunning to escape observation they did not succeed in fooling any one. Of limited intelligence, they fulfilled their duties without inspiration, tediously, greyly, and dully. Soon the children learned to recognize the detectives. Even at a distance they would say at the sight of a suspicious character: "There goes a detective!"
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