THE HOUSE OF GUISE.• Tim Princes of the House of
Guise were the moat brilliant and striking figures in the French history of the sixteenth century ; and it may be added that there were many worse men in that history than Claude, Francois, and Henri de Lorraine, successive Dues de Guise. They were great soldiers, arro- gant and ambitious, with a strain of weakness and vanity, but not more cruel or unprincipled than their contemporaries. They were generous and magnificent. Judged fairly and without prejudice, by the moral standard of their own time, either Francois or Henri was more worthy of the French throne than the Valois Princes, the sons of Henry IL and Catherine de' Medici. For falseness, treachery, Machiavellism, there was no comparison. If they played for their own hand, they did not, like the Queen, play off both parties, both religions, one against the other. A modern French historian puts it plainly that the work of the Guises and the raison d'etre of the League were to oppose the militant Proteatantism which had done muds towards actually devastating France. Here there is no question of the relative value of the religions, or of the personal character of a Guise or a Coligny. France suffered from both sides; and this would have been more generally recognized, had not the horrors culminated in Catherine's supreme crime and blunder, the Saint-Bartholomew. But the historical truth is that in the sixteenth century " lea huguenots oat voulu faire de la France, malgre elle, tine nation proteatante. La France n'a pas voulu retro." This is the explanation of the reign of Henri III. It was said at the time by the aoldierdiplo- matist Michel de Castelnau—one of the few moderate men who blamed both religious parties for their un-Christian violence— that almost all the people, as well as the clergy and some of the nobility, believed that " the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise were veritably called by God to preserve the Catholic religion."
It is curious to consider what the history of France might have been had Henri Due de Guise, the head of the League, deposed Henri III. and taken the place of the Henri IV. we know. By another crime, a dastardly assassination—another blunder, so far as his own fate was concerned—Henri m. saved France from this. But there would have been nothing very startling or incon- gruous in such a change of dynasty, for the House of Guise stood higher, with regard to the rest of the French nobility, than a Pepin le Bref or a Hugues Capet. The House of Lorraine, of which it was a younger branch, was a reigning House. Henri de. Guise, through his mother Anne d'Este, daughter of Renee de France, was great-grandson of King Louis Xii. The Queen- Dowager of Scotland was his aunt: Mary Stuart, Queen of France and of Scotland, was his first cousin. "Una situation politique sans egale ! " observes H. Louie BatiffoL A great House, and great was its fall. After the tragedy of Blois in December, 1588, no succeeding Due de Guise approached the talent or power of a Claude, a Francois, or a Henri. The seventh and last to hold the title died a little child and an only son, not a century later, in the year 1676.
Mr. Noel Williams is not to be described exactly as an his- torian. But he is an agreeable and painstaking historical writer, to whom the public owes a great number of those readable studies in French history which, by the way, sometimes hardly meet with all the praise merited by careful and diligent work. Such books, among which The Brood of False Lorraine should take a good place, are very useful in attracting people to history and making its dry bones live. In these volumes Mr. Noel Williams should have gained both objects. And be has never, we think, undertaken a more difficult period. Even the tragic political confusions of the mid-seventeenth century are nothing to.those of the sixteenth,and its characters are far more compli- cated, needing Jar more fairness and freedom from prejudice in study and presentation a fairness, for instance, rather inter- fared with by the book's catching title. The Brood of False Lorraine sounds well on the battlefield of Ivry, but real history cannot entirely accept such a description of a group of famous men.
• .2'do Brood of Fain Lorraine : the History of the Dues do Guile (1408-168n By IL NoolWllian 19B124 1111..hst..... 2 rola. London: Ilnichinoon nod
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