ABSTRACT
Catherine endeavoured to complete and perfect the draft of her religious policy. In the spring of 1560 she had already presented France with the means of avoiding forty years of massacre and ruin. The Governess of France wished to see matters for herself and to negotiate personally. She had agreed to read a remonstrance addressed to her on Ascension Day 1560, in which the Guises were accused of being the authors of all the ills of the kingdom. Between the Guises and the Bourbons, Madame Catherine, already the Governess of France, kept to the middle path recommended by Machiavelli’s empiricism. The facts prove that she was wise and foreseeing. Madame Catherine’s passionate preoccupation, which at that moment predominated over all other emotions, was whether she would at last come into power, since Charles IX was only ten years old. The moment had arrived for making the decisive move in order to triumph simultaneously over both the Guises and the Bourbons.
