Ferrara was in truth a centre where the Gospel found a firm support. Renée, who was daughter of Louis XII., and would have succeeded him if (as she used to say) ‘she had had a beard on her chin,’ had inherited, not the catholic ardor of her mother, Anne of Brittany, but the reforming and anti-popish spirit of her father, who had taken for his device: _Perdam Babylonis nomen_. Deprived of the throne by ‘that accursed Salic law’—to use her own words—but brought up at the court of Francis I., she was closely attached to her cousin Margaret, and although her junior by eighteen years, had eagerly embraced the Gospel which that ‘elder sister’ had preached to her with so much earnestness. Renée was not one of those people who are simply the disciples of others. Less beautiful than Margaret, she resembled her in possessing a great soul, a generous heart, and, more than that, a sound judgment and firm will. While clouds gathered round the mild and brilliant luminary which presided over the destinies of Navarre and obscured the end of its course, hardly a passing vapor dimmed for an instant the pure star of Ferrara and Montargis. There had been a talk of marrying Renée, as there had been of marrying Margaret, to Charles V., and also to Henry VIII.; but the politic Francis had preferred giving his predecessor’s daughter to a prince who would cause him no umbrage. She was therefore married to Hercules of Este, Duke of Ferrara, grandson of pope Alexander VI. by Lucrezia Borgia, and vassal of the Holy See. Such gloomy antecedents did not promise a sympathetic union to the friend of Margaret of Valois.