When she was once more in her kingdom, Jeanne d’Albret, taking up the work of Margaret of Valois, opened schools, colleges, and hospitals, and published a new code—a precious monument of good sense and wisdom—which bears the name of _Stil de la reine Jehanne_. Soon there was not a beggar in Béarn. The children of the poor, who showed any aptitude for sciences and literature, were educated at the expense of the treasury. Drunkenness, usury, and games of hazard were severely repressed. All the arts flourished with the new faith; and even now, at the end of three centuries, the people of Béarn pronounce the name of the _good queen_, who so greatly raised the prosperity of their country, with an affectionate veneration. Jeanne d’Albret had many struggles to sustain, and many perils to encounter. The Cardinal d’Armagnac reproached her, in the name of the pope, with having introduced into her dominions a heresy which had committed so many excesses. “You make me blush for you,” she answered him: “Take out the beam from your own eye, to see the mote in your neighbour’s; cleanse the earth from that just blood which you and yours have shed.” In 1563, Pius IV. cited the queen of Navarre to appear before the tribunal of the Inquisition within six months, under pain of forfeiting her crown and her possessions. Jeanne d’Albert complained of this (insult) to all the sovereigns of Europe; and Charles IX., on the advice of the Chancellor l’Hospital, told the pontiff that he was singularly offended at this attempt to withdraw a subject and vassal of the crown of France from her natural judges. Once again the pope gave way. The times of Gregory VII. no longer existed! Escaped from this peril, Jeanne d’Albret encountered another. The historian De Thou relates that the project was conceived at the court of Madrid, of carrying her off with her children, in order to hand her over to the Spanish Inquisition. The wife of Philip II., Elizabeth, a daughter of France, informed her of this intention, and the plot failed. If Jeanne d’Albret had been placed on a larger theatre, she might have been the greatest woman of her age. “She was,” says the Abbé de Laboureur, in his notes on the Mémoires de Castelnau, “the wisest, most generous, most learned princess of her time; she had in her heart the source of every virtue, and of every great quality.” Agrippa d’Aubigné says also: “Of woman she had nothing but the sex, her whole soul belonged to manly things, her powerful spirit to vast affairs, and her unconquerable heart to great adversities.” Whatever excellence Henry IV. possessed of a chivalrous character, or of love for his people, he inherited from his noble mother, and France must ever associate the name of Jeanne d’Albret with that of the most popular of her kings. V.