The King and the Queen [Louise de Lorraine], separately, and each accompanied by a good troop [of companions] went on foot from Paris to Chartres on a pilgrimage [voyage] to Notre-Dame-de-dessous-Terre [Our Lady of the Crypt], where a neuvaine was celebrated at the last mass at which the King and Queen assisted, and offered a silver-gilt statue of Notre Dame which weighed a hundred marks [eight hundred ounces], with the object of having lineage which might succeed to the throne. In the dead of winter, in robes of penitents, over the roughest roads, on foot, the King and Queen, then seven years married, walked fifty miles to Chartres to supplicate the Virgin for children, and back again; and this they did year after year until Jacques Clement put an end to it with his dagger, in 1589, although the Virgin never chose to perform that miracle; but, instead, allowed the House of Valois to die out and sat on her throne in patience while the House of Bourbon was anointed in their place. The only French King ever crowned in the presence of Our Lady of Chartres was Henry IV--a heretic. The year 1589, which was so decisive for Henry IV in France, marked in England the rise of Shakespeare as a sort of stage-monarch. While in France the Virgin still held such power that kings and queens asked her for favours, almost as instinctively as they had done five hundred years before, in England Shakespeare set all human nature and all human history on the stage, with hardly an allusion to the Virgin's name, unless as an oath. The exceptions are worth noting as a matter of curious Shakespearean criticism, for they are but two, and both are lines in the "First Part of Henry VI," spoken by the Maid of Orleans:-- Christ's mother helps me, else I were too weak!