the fire was lighted, held out his right hand, and erying out, "This hand hath offended!" held it among the flames until it blazed and burned away. His heart was found entire among his ashes. He redeemed his reputation by his heroic death, and left a memorable name in the history of England.

At this time Philip, Mary's husband, was at war with France. He came over from Spain to seek the assistance of England. Since his marriage with Mary he had lived most of the time in his own dominions. It is said that he seldom referred to his royal wife, and then only to his most familiar courtiers, and generally in the way of some coarse jest. But the queen caused war to be declared in his behalf, and raised a large sum of money to carry it on. But the English were surprised at Calais by the French duke of Guise, and completely defeated. This great loss not only mortified the pride of the nation, but proved a blow from which the queen never recovered. Happily for her subjects, she took a fever which was raging in England at this time, and which, together with the news of the loss of Calais, brought the reign and life of the bloody monster to an end. She died on the seventeenth of November, 1558, after reigning not quite five years and a half, and in the forty-fourth year of her age. "When I am dead, and my body is opened," she said to those around her,

"ye shall find Calais written on my heart." But had it been found that this woman had a heart, they would have more likely found written upon it, instead of Calais, these words: Lady Jane Grey, Hooper, Rogers, Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer, and three hundred people burnt alive within four years of my wicked reign, including sixty women and forty little children.' The news of her death gave great rejoicing all over the land. The rack and the stake had been the fruits of her barbarous reign, and the smoke of the fires that roasted men and women and little children to death had wrapped the nation in the gloom of a fearful horror. No name in the history of Great Britain is held in the remembrance of mankind with such utter detestation and abhorrence as that of Bloody Queen Mary.

CATHERINE DE
DE MEDICI.

No one can reflect without a shudder of horror upon the career of this wretched woman, who, for a time, held in her unsteady hand the destiny of fair and progressive France. By most of Roman Catholic writers this French Medea is adorned with all saintly virtues as the guardian and defender of the faith. To the historian she is an incomprehensible mystery. If ever a woman was guided by a malignant star, it was Catherine de Medici. Only an impartial statement of some of her cruelties and crimes will be attempted in this short sketch. The wife of one French king, the mother of three, the leader of the revelries and politics of the age in which she lived, the career of this female fiend, whose malevolent touch checked for a time the civilization of France, is one of more than ordinary interest.

Catherine was born at Florence in 1519, and was the daughter of Lorenzo de Medici, that ruler of Florence for whom Machiavelli wrote the "Prince." She was sent to a convent at an early age, having lost both of her parents. It was foretold at her birth that she would bring destruction to the city where she was born, and the townspeople of Florence would have exposed the babe in a basket to the balls of their enemies. But she was preserved alive, was shut up in a convent, and in the school of Machiavelli learned dissimulation and fraud.

When only fourteen she was married to the Duke of Orleans, afterwards Henry II. Pope Clement VII. was her uncle, and Francis L., king of France, anxious to win his support, married his heir to the portionless orphau.

During the reign of Francis, Catherine exercised no maeence in France. She was young, a foreigner, and was utterly

thrown in the shade by more important persons. She seemed a child of evil omen. Her uncle, the pope, soon died. Francis regretted the hasty marriage. Her husband neglected her for Diana Poitiers; and she had come into the family of Valois only to be contemned by her regal relatives as the impoverished descendant of a race of merchants. Only the nominal wife of a depraved king, she lived for many years powerless and obscure. For ten years after her marriage she had no children. A divorce began to be discussed at court. Catherine now resorted to her wonderful Italian tact. She presented herself to the king, threw herself at his feet, and swore her willingness to remain the wife of his son, or in case another wife should be chosen, to be one of her humblest attendants. She won the heart of Francis, and the divorce. was heard of no more. She had the happiness of bringing him grandchildren before she died.

Her husband succeeded Francis, and during his reign, from 1549 to 1559, she led a passive but observant life. Henry was completely under the influence of his mistress, Diana of Poitiers. After the accession of her son, Francis II., she exercised little or no authority. Francis seemed completely under the spell of Mary Stuart, and the cardinal of Lorraine and the duke of Guise managed the affairs of France. Yet Catherine was singularly beautiful. She inherited the large and lustrous eyes of the Medicean family, and her graceful form, her brilliant complexion, her large and lustrous eyes, and her hand and arm that no sculptor could imitate, were set off by manners so soft and engaging as to even win the admiration of her foes. No one would suspect that her placid countenance concealed the passions and relentless hatred of the most ambitious of women. From Lorenzo the Magnificent she had inherited a taste for lavish elegance. She shone at tourneys and glittered in stately processions. The death of Francis opened to Catherine a career worthy of the most soaring ambition. She became the regent during the minority of the new king, Charles IX., her second son, then only ten years old.

At this time France had fallen into a critical condition. The hostility between the Reformation and the old religion was beginning to assume a dangerous character. After more than thirty years of unrelenting persecution, of dreadful atrocities perpetrated in every town by emissaries of the pope, the patient Huguenots had taken up arms in self-defense. They determined to meet the savage barbarians of the Inquisition with more effectual weapons than spiritual arms. For ten years all France was filled with civil discord. Factories were closed, the seats of industry sunk into decay, and an exterminating warfare wasted the vigor of the nation. The ambitious family of the Guises stood at the head of the Catholic faction. They inculcated an undying hatred toward the Huguenots, and incessantly called for their extermination. Pope Paul IV., actuated by strong wine and the insanity of a corrupt old age, had instigated the persecutions that led to the outbreak. Pius IV. and V. fanned the fires of fanaticism and aroused the maddened Catholics to deeds of cruelty and bloodshed.

The two Guises, duke Francis, and Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, controlled the court and king. Their aim was to extirpate heresy, and to lay France at the feet of the Roman pontiff, purified by a general massacre of his foes. Duke Francis and the cardinal were called by their contemporaries, "the Butchers." Nothing afforded them such savage satisfaction as the spectacle of a heretic dying of torture. It was the custom of the cardinal, after a stately dinner at his regal palace, to show his guests a fair array of martyrs, executed for their entertainment, or sometimes to hang up a burly Huguenot in the banqueting chamber itself. Such monsters as the Guises could only have been produced by Catholic Christianity. At the battle of Dreux (1562) the Huguenots were defeated by the duke of Guise; but at the seige of Orleans the duke fell by the hands of an assassin. Upon his death Catherine became the most important personage in France. Hers was now an eventful career, and civil wars succeeded each other to the close of her life. But it is with the

massacre of St. Bartholomew (twenty-fourth of August, 1572), that her name will be especially associated in history.

The terrible tragedy of Bartholomew was the direct consequence of the teachings of the popes. Catherine had become weary of incessant war. She resolved to end it by the total extermination of all the Huguenot leaders at one fell blow. She had been brought up in the school of Machiavelli. As if to exemplify the lessons she had learned, she now matured a dark and horrid plot for drawing into her toils all the chiefs and eminent men who had successfully resisted the force of the Catholic armies. And so she planned the massacre of St. Bartholomew. A secret joy filled the hearts of such faithful Catholics as she had trusted with a premonition of the approaching slaughter.

She proposed a pacification between the hostile parties. The union was to be completed by the marriage of her daughter Marguerite to young Henry, son of Jeanne, queen of Navarre, her hated rival. The queen of Navarre was the most austere of the Huguenots, but for the sake of peace for her party had yielded to the arts of Catherine. For the sake of the suffered her son to

oppressed Huguenots, this grand queen marry the child of the house of Valois, and ventured to come up to Paris, the citadel of her bitterest foe. Her death soon followed. It was said by the annalists of the period that the mother of the expected bride had poisoned the mother of the bridegoom by presenting her with a pair of perfumed gloves, prepared with a deadly powder. There is no doubt that the spotless queen of Navarre was made away with by the Italian arts of Catherine. Jeanne d'Albret died as she had lived. Rejecting the proffered offices of the profligate ladies of Catherine's corrupt court, she expired asking the prayers of the Huguenot pastors and their simple ceremonies. of burial.

Coligny was one of the most eminent chiefs of the reformers. He also was lured into the fatal snare. Trusting the word of his king he rode boldly into Paris. He had been warned by faithful friends. The wife of a peasant had clung