CATHERINE DE' MEDICI AND THE FRENCH REFORMATION.*

READERS of Miss Sichel's former books will easily understand that this is not a complete biography of Catherine de' Medici, but a series of interesting and attractive historical studies, dealing not only with the Queen herself and the effect on her times of her strange character, but with other leading figures of the mid-sixteenth century. For instance, one section of the book has Diane de Poitiers as its figure of central interest; another, Eleonore de Roye, the Huguenot Princess of Conde ; another, Queen Jeanne of Navarre ; another, Coligny and the chief Huguenots. Antoine de Bourbon is a prominent character, as well as his brother, Louis • Prince de Conde. The later studies deal with Ronsard, Palissy, and other great poets and artists of Catherine's time, including her architect, Philibert de l'Orme, who built the Tuileries for her. Catherine's practical mind, it seems, preferred architecture to any other art.

But Miss Sichel has succeeded in her object, difficult

enough to attain in a series of pictures of those wonderful years, years of transition from the Renaissance to the modern world; she has made and kept one real centre, one moving spirit at the heart of all : the extraordinary woman whom Michelet called " un ver sorti du tombeau de l'Italie." And Catherine de' Medici is not by any means a character easy of realisation. As Miss Sichel impresses on us very clearly, and proves convincingly, she was not the monster of active wickedness the world has pictured her so long. It was the St. Bartholomew, more than any other event in her life, which really justified the terrible character she bears in history. And though Miss Sichel does not whitewash Catherine—far from it—she yet shows how the massacre was the result and culmination of much that had gone before in Catherine's long struggle for power. She had arrived at a point where some strong measure was necessary, if she was not to lose all she had gained :— "St. Bartholomew's Eve cannot be taken as a measure of her * Catherine de Medici and the French Reformation. By Edith SicheL With 12 Illustrations. London: A. Constable and Co. 115s. net.] actions, for it was not a deliberate plan, but a forcing of her hand through her own shortsightedness. She had made the mistake natural to her. She had underrated Coligny and his power, which threatened to vie with her own. His removal became necessary, and the Guises were only too willing to be her agents in the matter. It was when they failed to kill him, when the rumour ran that the Protestants vowed an instant and general vengeance for this plot against their chief, that panic seized her. She felt she must effectually forestall them, and the result was the massacre."

The truth about Catherine de' Medici seems to be that, on the whole, her character was more odious than her deeds. Not many actual murders in cold blood are to be laid to her charge, and this is something to say for a Queen who was brought up and lived in the worst, the decadent time of the Renaissance. The wholesale poisonings of which she was accused by the historians and romancers of the past are "all founded on scandal invented by her foss, the Huguenots, and there were no greater ecandaknongers than the Huguenots. She shared the brunt of such evil reports with every monarch and prominent prelate of her day." So says modern research ; and it must be added that, with an entire absence of principle, Catherine cannot be accused of any actual immorality of life. She deserves no credit for this : it was a matter of temperament, prudence, policy : she planned any amount of immorality for other people, and was only angry with them when they were stupid enough to be found out. "In- difference," says Miss Sichel, " was the dominant note of her character and entire indifference means entire cynicism." She was perfectly cool and perfectly tolerant. For many years, a curious fact sometimes forgotten, she frankly favoured the Huguenot side. It was stronger in France during the sixteenth century than people always realise. Protestantism was the fashion among many of the greatest princes and nobles, and it was at first Catherine's policy to base her power on theirs. She balanced the two sides against each other, with entire selfishness and an absolute absence of conviction. The whole history is most curious and worth the closest study.

Only two strong feelings appear to have ruled Catherine's heart and mind' throughout her whole life. The first was her-love for her husband. Henry II. never loved her ; but the one passion of her life was for him, if we do not count an early' fancy for her cousin, Ippolito de' Medici, whom she would willingly have married. The long and perfect dominion of Diane de Poitiers over the King was borne by the Queen, outwardly at least, with the silent patience which knows how to wait. Yet she was too wise and cool to put herself in the wrong by any violent revenge, when the King's early death left Diane in her power. Many Renaissance women would have found an appropriate poison ready to hand. The exchange of Chaumont for Chenonceaux seems a mild punish. ment for the woman who bad robbed Catherine of her children, as well as of her husband. All the children of Henry and Catherine were brought up under Diane's magnifi- cent care. Miss Sichel's study of her and her splendid home at' Anet is extremely entertaining, and the comparison with Madame de Maintenon is ingenious enough. But we are inclined • to think that Madame Searron was a cleverer woman, with a keener eye to her own advantage, than Madame de Breze. Louis XIV.'s governing lady possessed, we venture to say, a cool and calculating prudence worthy of Catherine de' Medici, though she lived in another world. The difference in civilisation that grew up in those hundred years, say from 1570 to 1670, was greater than it is easy to realise. We can understand seventeenth-century minds; their principles and opinions are of the same order as our own. The people of the late Renaissance stand on another shore.

This is a fact often forgotten, even by clever writers, in dealing with the brilliant figures of Italy and France in those days. It is one of Miss Sichel's great merits that she does not judge such personalities as Catherine de' Medici and Diane de Poitiers by modern standards, or from a modern point of view :— "There is, perhaps, nobody so hard to realise as the woman of the Renaissance. The woman of the Middle Ages, still rather primitive, with occupations and restrictions far remote from ours, is_eomparatirely easy to grasp because she is out of reach. But the woman of the sixteenth century, robust, naïve, intellectual, Pursuing interests and activities like our own, with widely differentthoughts and aspirations, is almost impossible to recon- struct. There is probably no such dividing gulf as superficial likeness, and these ladies were so vivid that no pale presentation We must also get rid of our notions of ordinary human feeling, for the humanity of such a woman as Catherine, and of many of her contemporaries, was in its best sense non existent. Sympathy, for instance, was unknown to them : they were indifferent to other people's sorrows, and a blind

anger against fate represented their own. Miss Siohel quotes from a letter of Catherine's to " a lady who had just lost a much-loved parent" :—" I advise you while you are at home to dress yourself as comfortably as possible and to grieve as little as you can for things that 'Cannot be mended." This was meant for kindness. Catherine was herself much of a Stoic, and endured her troubles • without talking about them. Such courage is no doubt to be admired ; but indifference was at the bottom of it all, and we follow

her life and study her mind, as Miss Sichel says, "with admiration but with hatred." When anything really annoyed her or interfered with her plans, • she could be furiously, brutally angry. Her daughter, the Queen of Navarre, bears witness to this.

The second ruling passion of Catherine's life was the desire to reign, and after Henry's death this was to a certain extent satisfied. As Regent for her miserable eons, she had the destinies of France more or less in her hands for years. Not that she could ever afford to pause in her struggle for the power which would have slipped at once from a loosened

grasp. All her political and religious changes of front are to be ascribed to this passion for power. Coligny and the

Guises were her friends by turns. Forms of religion were

alike to her, who was practically a pagan. The intellectual side of Protestantism attracted her, but its teaching of moral responsibility could never have seemed to her anything but

nonsense. She was in some ways astonishingly modern ; scientific, materialist, an incarnation of common-sense. She might indeed—and we have never seen it brought out more clearly than in Miss Sichel's book—be taken as one of the supreme .examples in history of a character absolutely

without religion or morality, yet with all the qualities needed for success in this world : a character, too, whose crimes were solely dictated by policy.

We have not space here to discuss a subject to which Miss Sichel gives an interesting chapter, " Why the Reformation

Failed in France." It is indeed a subject which needs a

volume, not a chapter, and which can only be barely-touched upon in .a review. " Generalisations are dangerous," and

nowhere more so than in dealing with questions of religion and national character. Political factions may come and go, as they did in the sixteenth century, and each may take a different side of religion for its watchword. Such factions never did, and never will, change the inner, the deepest` religious convictions of a country. Race has a good deal to do with it. The.French as a nation will never be Protestant, any more than the Spaniards, Italians, or Irish. Separate minds may be drawn by conviction hither or thither ; it takes more to change "the soul of a people." Protestantism lacks perhaps a certain depth of comprehension of the Latin nature, one side of which shows practical common-sense, the other a need of mystic beliefs and. of ritual. France may

appear utilitarian enough ; but we can assure Miss Sichel that there are yet millions whose "real conviction" is not " represented by the Court religion of a Guise or of a

Richelieu, and by the Concordat of Napoleon," any more than by transitory superstitions of nature-worship, humanity-worship, and so on. The real religion of the best in France is not proclaimed in newspapers or on platforms ; and it is a subject of all others on which "generalisations are dangerous."