But scowling faces there were not a few, for this was the triumph of the house of Lorraine, and the debonair Duke of Guise and his brothers took no pains to hide their elation, whilst the princes of the blood of the house of Bourbon, the Montmorencis and the reformers were full of foreboding, for they knew now that their enemies could look across the Pyrenees, almost certain of aid from the most powerful potentate on earth. Queen Catharine, too, clerical though she was, smiled with a bitter heart, for she had no love for the house of Guise. For days the festivities went on: masque and banquet, ball and tournament following each other with wearisome brilliancy, for another daughter of France, Margaret, was wedded at the same time to the Duke of Savoy, and the double nuptials called for double display. At length the last and greatest of the gallant shows was held under the shadow of the Bastille, hard by the gate of St. Antoine, on the 30th June. In gorgeous tribunes under broidered silken canopies sat the Queen of France and Spain, Catharine and her dearest daughter; and the Duchesses of Lorraine and Savoy, with the fairest court in Christendom, gathered around the great parallelogram of the lists to witness the tournament. The glittering courtiers, gay as they looked, who stood behind the ladies in the seats, knew that the wedding feast really celebrated a political event of the first consequence. It foreboded the suppression of Protestantism in Scotland by France, a war with England, and the crushing of reform in France itself and in Flanders; for there was to be no more paralysing rivalry between Philip and his new father-in-law, and it made the Catholic Guises the masters of France. But none could tell that the stroke that was to set all these events into immediate motion was to fall so soon. Henry II., shallow and vain of his unquestioned preeminence in the gallant sport, rode into the lists upon a big bay war horse, decked, like its rider, with the black and white devices and interlaced crescents of Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois. The King of France was determined in the presence of the Spanish grandees to show that he, at least, was no carpet knight, like their King Philip, and he rode course after course victoriously with princes and nobles, until the light began to wane. Catharine, desirous of ending the dangerous sport, sent a message from her tribune to pray her husband to tilt no more for that day. Henry laughed to scorn such timid counsel. He would run once more against the Franco-Scot Montgomerie, Sieur de L’Orge, who tried his best to avoid the encounter without success. At the first shock Montgomerie’s lance carried away the King’s visor, but the shaft broke with the force of the impact and a great jagged splinter pierced the eye and brain of Henry of Valois, who, within three days, was dead.