Henry M. Baird · 270 of 379

CHAPTER XI · Catharine's neutrality.

Yet the position of Catharine, it must be admitted, was by no means an easy one. The ablest statesman might have shrunk from coping with the financial difficulties that beset her. The crown was almost hopelessly involved. Henry the Second had in the course of a dozen years accumulated, by prodigal gifts and by needless wars, a debt—enormous for that age—of forty-two millions of francs, besides alienating the crown lands and raising by taxation a larger sum of money than had been collected in eighty years previous. The Venetian Michele summed up the perplexities of the political situation under two questions: How to relieve the people, now thoroughly exhausted; and, how to rescue the crown from its poverty. But, in reality, the financial embarrassment was the least of the difficulties of the position Catharine had assumed. The kingdom was rent with dissensions. Two religions were struggling—the one for exclusive supremacy, the other at least for toleration and recognition. Catharine had no strong religious convictions to actuate her in deciding which of the two she should embrace. Two powerful political parties were contending for the ascendency—that of the princes of the blood and of constitutional usage, and that of an ambitious family newly introduced into the kingdom, but a family which had succeeded in attaching to itself most, if not all, of the favorites of preceding kings. Catharine's ambition, in the absence of any convictions of right, regarded the success of either as detrimental to her own authority. She had, therefore, resolved to play off the one against the other, in the hope of being able, through their mutual antagonism, to become the mistress of both. Under the reign of Francis the Second she had gained some notion of the humiliation to which the Guises, in their moment of fancied security, would willingly have reduced her. Yet, after all, the illegal usurpation of the Guises, who might, from their past experience, be more tolerant of her ambitious designs, was less formidable to her than the claims of the Bourbon princes, based as were these claims upon ancestral usage and right, and equally fatal to her pretensions and to those of their rivals. It was a situation of appalling difficulty for a woman sustained in her course by no lofty consciousness of integrity and devotion to duty—for a woman who was by nature timid, and by education inclined to resort for guidance to judicial astrology or magic rather than to religion.