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CHAPTER XII · The Venetian envoy's lugubrious account of France.

It could not be denied that the situation was critical in the extreme. Long-headed diplomatists of the conservative school shook their heads ominously. They hinted that there might be only too much truth in the current Catholic saying that the Medici family was destined to be fatal to Christendom. Under Leo the Tenth Germany was lost to the papacy, under Clement the Eighth England had apostatized, and now under Pius the Fourth, a third Pope of the same ill-starred race, France was on the brink of ruin. The king was a boy, without experience and without authority, the council full of discord, the supreme power in the hands of the queen, who, though sagacious, was yet only a woman, and both timid and irresolute. The King of Navarre, while noble and gracious, was a prince of little constancy and limited practice in government. The people were in disorder and manifest division. Everywhere there were seditious and insolent men, who, under the pretext of religion, had disturbed the general peace, overturned customs and discipline, and put in doubt the royal authority and the safety of all. Oh, that Philip the Second had the courage of his father, or that Charles the Fifth had had his son's glorious opportunity—then would France be France no longer! For just so certainly as the Spanish king was looked upon with suspicion by the rulers, was he longed for by all that hated the present state of things, and, most of all, by the prelates and the rest of the Catholics, who knew not in what other quarter to look for salvation.