" War or peace hung on the
color of a ball-dress, and Madame de Chevreuse knew which party was coming
uppermost, by observing whether the binding of Madame de Hautefort's
prayer-book was red or green. Perhaps it was all a little theatrical, but
the performers were all Rachels.
And behind the crimes and the frivolities stood the Parliaments, calm and
undaunted, with leaders, like Mole and Talon, who needed nothing but
success to make their names as grand in history as those of Pym and
Hampden. Among the Brienne Papers in the British Museum there is a
collection of the manifestoes and proclamations of that time, and they are
earnest, eloquent, and powerful, from beginning to end. Lord Mahon alone
among historians, so far as our knowledge goes, has done fit and full
justice to the French parliaments, those assemblies which refused
admission to the foreign armies which the nobles would gladly have
summoned in,--but fed and protected the banished princesses of England,
when the court party had left those descendants of the Bourbons to die of
cold and hunger in the palace of their ancestors. And we have the
testimony of Henrietta Maria herself, the only person who had seen both
revolutions near at hand, that "the troubles in England never appeared so
formidable in their early days, nor were the leaders of the revolutionary
party so ardent or so united.
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