Had Antoine embraced with sincerity and steadfastly maintained either of the two phases of religious belief which divided between them the whole of western Christendom, his death would have left a void which could have been filled with difficulty. He was the first prince of the blood, and entitled to the regency. His appearance was prepossessing, his manners courteous. He was esteemed a capable general, and was certainly not destitute of administrative ability. If, with hearty devotion, he had given himself to the reformed views, the authority of his great name and eminent position might have secured for their adherents, if not triumph, at least toleration and quiet. But two capital weaknesses ruined his entire course. The love of empty glory blinded him to his true interests; and the love of sensual pleasure made him an easy dupe. He was robbed of his legitimate claims to the first rank in France by the promise of a shadowy sceptre in some distant region, which every sensible statesman of his time knew from the first that Philip the Second never had entertained the slightest intention of conferring; while, by the siren voices of her fair maids of honor, Catharine de' Medici was always sure of being able to lure him on to the most humiliating concessions. Deceived by the emissaries of the Spanish king and the Italian queen mother, Antoine would have been an object rather of pity than of disgust, had he not himself played false to the friends who supported him. As it was, he passed off the stage, and scarcely left a single person to regret his departure. Huguenots and papists were alike gratified when the world was relieved of so signal an example of inconstancy and perfidy.[183] Antoine left behind him his wife, the eminent Jeanne d'Albret, and two children--a son, the Prince of Bearn, soon to appear in history as the leader of the Huguenot party, and, on the extinction of the Valois line, to succeed to the throne as Henry the Fourth; and a daughter, Catharine, who inherited all her mother's signal virtues. The widow and her children were, at the time of Antoine's death, in Jeanne's dominions on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, whither they had retired when he had first openly gone over to the side of the Guises. There, in the midst of her own subjects, the Queen of Navarre was studying, more intelligently than any other monarch of her age, the true welfare of her people, while training her son in those principles upon which she hoped to see him lay the foundations of a great and glorious career. [Sidenote: The English in Havre.]