Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/133

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 125 and, at times, the policy of the queen who played a leading part from nearly the beginning until within a short space from the end. The book is primarily a biography, almost an autobiography. Naturally enough the more obscure stretches of Catherine's career gain more from a perusal of her letters than the dramatic scenes of violence such as the St. Bartholo- mew or the murder of Henry of Guise, in which latter, indeed, Catherine was but indirectly concerned. When she was at the centre of affairs the correspondence would be mainly ministerial rather than personal. The chapters which contribute most that is fresh are those headed ' La Campagne de Pacification a I'lnterieur, 1578-9 ', and ' La Diversion en Portugal '. During her travels she was usually away from her son, Henry III, and her most trusty ministers, especially Bellievre and Villeroy. Her letters, therefore, are more frequent and more personal ; to these may be added the chatty correspondence with her chief friend, the Duchesse d'Uzes. In the former of these chapters Catherine is seen at her very best, for she is honestly striving to reconcile her two sons, her daughter, and her son-in-law, Navarre, and also the three parties, Catholic, Huguenot, and Politique. The letters here illustrate her strong maternal affection, her physical endurance of discomfort, danger, and intense fatigue, her real patriotism in her efforts to re-create a united kingdom. When on these exhausting journeys she emulated, and perhaps surpassed, Louis XI, who was her model of what a king should be, in the practice, rare among French kings, of gaining a geographical knowledge of France. But, unlike Louis, she laboured on the whole rather to reconcile than to divide. The ' Diversion en Portugal ' displays her passion for a meddlesome foreign policy, dynastic rather than national, having as its aim a Spanish marriage for her youngest son. M. Mariejol holds, and, it would seem, rightly, that Catherine had little intention of conquering the Azores, still less of colonizing Brazil or of realizing her ridiculous pretensions to the crown of Portugal. Her plan was to throttle Philip II into concession of a principality for Anjou by seizing the key of communication between Spain and the Indies. The scheme was strategically correct, superior in conception to the individualistic, plundering raids of the English corsairs on the Spanish main. But the execution was careless and inept, just as was her grudging support of Anjou in his attempts upon the Netherlands, which had precisely the same object, not conquest but matrimony. There was no Chauvinism or militarism in Catherine. She would always avoid war if she could help it, for in a great national war a woman and a foreigner would lose her influence, but she could not help it, if she was to rid Henry III of his unconscionable brother and heir presumptive, and so avoid a civil war not only religious but fratricidal. M. Mariejol points out that all Catherine's military volitions cease with Anjou's death. He has no belief in the hypothesis that Catherine's efforts for the greatness of Anjou were based on an idea of Henry's early death, and that their aim was therefore the expansion of France. She was working not for Anjou but for the security of his elder brother, her favourite son, and the means could only be a principality at the expense of Philip II. Yet, it may be noted, Spain was the power which she always greatly feared. She could