The Protestants were accused of rejoicing at Henry’s death: they not only made songs upon it, but “offered thanks, or rather blasphemies, to God, daring to say that the Almighty had struck him under the walls of the Bastille, where he detained the innocent in prison.”[83] It is possible that there may be some foundation for this charge, for it requires a great amount of true Christian feeling to make the victims forbear from exulting at the removal of their persecutor by what seems to them the judgment of God. In his dedicatory epistle of the Psalms done into French Verse, Beza thus paints the second Henry:

Je vois un masque avec sa maigre mine
Qui fait trembler les lieux où il chemine.

But the “Lutherans” did not tremble: they bore their testimony with Christian resolution, and acted up to the noble lines in the same poem:

S’il faut servir au Seigneur de témoins,
Mourons, mourons, louans Dieu pour le moins.
Au départir de ces lieux misérables,
Pour traverser aux cieux tant désirables.
Que les tyrans soient de nous martyrer
Plutôt lassés, que nous de l’endurer.

The sincerity of Catherine’s grief for the loss of her husband has been much doubted, but without sufficient cause. To a woman of her temper the change wrought in her position by widowhood must at first have been hard to bear. She certainly felt as much for her husband while living, as such selfish natures can feel, and commemorated her bereavement and regret in the ornaments of her palace of the Tuileries, where the broken mirrors, plumes reversed, and scattered jewelry carved on certain columns have been regarded as emblems of her sorrow.[84] A garrulous contemporary (whom we shall have frequent occasion to quote), lamenting the death of Henry II., praises him particularly for the discipline he introduced into the army,[85] which was such “that the peasants hardly deigned to shut the doors of their cellars, granaries, chests, or other lock-up places for fear of the soldiers, who conducted themselves most becomingly. When billeted in the villages, they would not venture to touch the hens or other poultry without first asking their host’s leave and paying for them.”[86] It is a pity to spoil so Arcadian a story; but if it is true, there must have been a sad falling off in the military discipline in a few months, for Francis II. writes in 1560 to the Duke of Aumale, then in Burgundy, “to punish the men-at-arms and archers who had lived without paying.”[87]