Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/218

Rh Henry of Navarre, it is said, weary of these continual troubles, boxed his illustrious consort on the ears, exclaiming, "Madame, you want to know too much!" It was difficult for Margaret to satisfy at once her husband, her brother, her Lutheran teachers, and her own liberal conscience. Sometimes that credulous and tolerant conscience led her sorely astray. In this year of 1545 she sheltered in her hospitable Court two would-be Lutherans, dressed as monks, named Quentin and Pocques. These men speedily rose to eminence at Nérac. Their vague spiritualism, their insidious, amorous mysticism, was quite to the taste of the little Court there. Margaret, ever dense, and now quite bewildered by a long experience of gallantry and mysticism, saw nothing to blame in their tenets. But, after some while, Calvin, at Geneva, hearing of these new lights of Navarre, made inquiries. He was scandalised when he learned the truth. These men, the principals of the infamous sect of Libertines, or Brothers of the Free Spirit, had been exiled from State to State, shunned by all for their impious and monstrous doctrines, for the debauchery and vice of their behaviour. He wrote to the Queen, his old protectress, and let her hear in no honeyed terms what were these ministers of hers. Then Quentin and Pocques, those prosperous refugees, had to be dismissed. But the spirit of moral relaxation, the vague mysticism, which had tolerated their presence, could not be sent as easily away.

For, in the time of political emptiness, in the pause following the death of the Duke of Orleans, Margaret's spirit, no longer braced by the large air of the world's affairs, had become enervated and languid and dreamy. Her visionary disposition asserted itself more and