On the matrimonial question the king’s feeling was so strong that he expressed it roughly. Jeanne d’Albret having said to him one day that the pope would make them wait a long while for the dispensation requested for the marriage, “No, no, my clear aunt,” said the king; “I honor you more than I do the pope, and I love my sister more than I fear him. I am not a Huguenot, but no more am I an ass. If the pope has too much of his nonsense, I will myself take Margot by the hand and carry her off to be married in open conventicle.” Toligny, for his part, was so pleased with the measures that Charles IX. had taken in favor of the Low Countries in their quarrels with Philip II., and so confident himself of his influence over the king, that when Tavannes was complaining in his presence “that the vanquished should make laws for the victors,” Coligny said to his face, “Whoever is not for war with Spain is not a good Frenchman, and has the red cross inside him.” The Catholics were getting alarmed and irritated. The Guises and their partisans left the court. It was near the time fixed for the marriage of Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois; the new pope, Gregory XIII., who had at first shown more pliancy than his predecessor Pius V., attached to the dispensation conditions to which neither the intended husband nor King Charles IX. himself was inclined to consent. The Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, who had gone to Paris in preparation for the marriage, had died there on the 8th of June, 1572; a death which had given rise to very likely ill-founded accusations of poisoning. “A princess,” says D’Aubigne, “with nothing of a woman but the sex, with a soul full of everything manly, a mind fit to cope with affairs of moment, and a heart invincible in adversity.” It was in deep mourning that her son, become King of Navarre, arrived at court, attended by eight hundred gentlemen, all likewise in mourning. “But,” says Marguerite de Valois herself, “the nuptials took place a few days afterwards with such triumph and magnificence as none others of my quality; the King of Navarre and his troop having changed their mourning for very rich and fine clothes, and I being dressed royally, with crown and corset of tufted ermine, all blazing with crown-jewels, and the grand blue mantle with a train four ells long borne by three princesses, the people choking one another down below to see us pass.” The marriage was celebrated on the 18th of August, by the Cardinal of Bourbon, in front of the principal entrance of Notre-Dame. When the Princess Marguerite was asked if she consented, she appeared to hesitate a moment; but King Charles IX. put his hand a little roughly on her head, and made her lower it in token of assent. Accompanied by the king, the queen-mother, and all the Catholics present, Marguerite went to hear mass in the choir; Henry and his Protestant friends walked about the cloister and the nave;