Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre

Front matter

MARGARET OF ANGOULÊME

QUEEN OF NAVARRE

BY

Chapter 1

(1491–1515.)

CHILDHOOD AND MARRIAGE.

When Louisa of Savoy, beautiful, accomplished, barely fifteen years old, was given in marriage to Charles of Orleans, Count of Angoulême, it can have seemed no brilliant alliance on her part. The bridegroom was twenty years older than the bride, of fallen fortunes, and banished from the Court of France. That he was a possible heir to the Crown can only have counted as a splendid piece of heraldry, for the young king, Charles VIII., was newly wedded to Anne of Brittany, and his sister's husband, the heir-presumptive, was a vigorous young man of nine-and-twenty, likely to live long and have many children.

These two young lives stood between the Crown and the Count of Angoulême. It was not likely that he, delicate, gentle, fastidious, should outlive them. But the Count's position as a possible heir made him an honourable match, though poor, for the girlish Princess of Savoy. Her father sanctioned the marriage gladly. Louisa's mother was dead, and he had children by his second wife. He was willing to marry his elder daughter honourably and without expense. On her marriage he gave with her a dowry of 35,000 livres—a small sum, considering that her mother had been a very wealthy heiress. But Philip of Savoy, with several children to endow, and a throne ever threatened by the surrounding kingdoms, had many uses for his money. The Count of Angoulême, for his part, assigned the Castles of Cognac and Romorantin to Louisa, and these were to remain to her as dower-houses in the event of her widowhood. Finally, all affairs being settled, Charles of Orleans, in the year 1491, was married to his youthful bride.

The Count went with his wife to live on his property in Angoulême. From the French Court he was debarred by the King's displeasure, for the reason that long ago he had joined the rebellion of Brittany. It was no punishment to Charles to live a country life. His gentle and quiet tastes, his benevolence, his gift for organization, all were employed and satisfied in the orderly routine of managing a great property. He had his reward in peaceful years and in the loving devotion of his tenantry. But such a life might easily have wearied a beautiful child of fifteen, exceedingly accomplished, a princess, brilliant, and fond of power. There was, however, in Louisa's nature a passionate capacity for devotion. This, in fact, is the key-note of her life. She fell in love, deeply and all-sufficingly, with her courteous, elderly husband: the banishment in which he shone delighted her; the delicate chivalry of his character won her passionate approval. At this age she must have been a beautiful girl, with aquiline features, in which the latent coarseness was as yet undeveloped, dark, with an ardent Italian air. She knew a little Latin, and was fond of quoting it; she was well and widely read in French, and could speak several modern languages; there were few better instructed princesses in Europe. Her manners at this time were gentle and submissive, for she had voluntarily bowed herself under the yoke of an impassioned reverence. The violent ambition of her later years was still unguessed and latent in her soul.

Charles and his bride spent the first year of their marriage in the Castle of Angoulême, and there, in the following spring, their eldest child was born. In the Journal in which, later on, Louisa noted the great events of her life, she thus records the date:—

"My daughter Margaret was born in the year 1492, the eleventh day of April, at two o'clock in the morning, that is to say, the tenth day, fourteen hours and ten minutes, counting after the fashion of the astronomers."

As the little girl grew out of babyhood, people noticed that her mother's aquiline features were softened in her face by the look and smile of her gentle father, and that in her character his delicate and benevolent nature qualified the love of learning and capacity for devotion which her mother gave her. More intense than he, more refined and unworldly than Louisa, the little Margaret displayed a singular and beautiful personality. The young Countess was very proud of her and, almost from her cradle, began to cultivate the sensitive intelligence of the child. But, while Margaret was still little more than a baby, a more important personage appeared upon the scene, one who henceforth should be the very centre of existence both to Margaret and to her mother.

"Francis, by the grace of God, King of France, and my pacific Cæsar, took his first experience of earthly light at Congnac, about ten hours after noon, the twelfth day of September 1494."

So triumphantly runs Louisa's journal. But the next entry sobers all that joy:—

"The first day of January 1496 I lost my husband."

An intermittent fever, common and fatal in those days of imperfect drainage, carried off the Count of Angoulême at forty, and left Louisa a widow in her twentieth year. For some weeks it appeared as though her two little children might be left utterly desolate, for, broken down with long nursing and a most bitter sorrow, the young Countess fell seriously ill. She was, however, too young, too vigorous, to die of grief. She recovered, finding in her children sufficient motive for existence. Retiring to her dower-house of Romorantin, Louisa busied herself in training Margaret. This girl she intended to become the most accomplished princess of her age. Madame de Chatillon, a lady of great learning, rank, and virtue, was engaged as governess to the young princess, and scholars of note were employed to instruct her in Latin, in philosophy, and in divinity. But if Louisa cared so well for her daughter, yet more absolutely was she engrossed by the future of her infant son. Her passionate heart, left empty by her husband's death, gave harbour to an unrestrained ambition, and her dreams began early to fulfil themselves. On the 6th April 1498 the young King died childless, and his childless brother-in-law, Louis, Duke of Orleans, succeeded him, under the title of Louis XII. These events made the little boy at Romorantin heir-presumptive to the throne of France.

But Louis was anxious to leave a nearer heir. He divorced his faithful, ugly wife, the crippled daughter of Louis XI., and espoused Anne of Brittany, the beautiful Queen Dowager, whom he had desired to marry in his early youth. Anne and Louisa were implacable at heart. The stern little Breton Queen was as obstinate as the Countess, but far more sedate: determined, ambitious, and secret. She had a great contempt for Louisa's violent aspirations; a very rigid Catholic, she looked with misliking on the free speech and wide reading of the young Countess of Angoulême. But King Louis was resolved to be friends with his handsome cousin and her children. It was, indeed, to Louisa's Castle of Romorantin that Anne repaired to await her first confinement. With what strenuous prayer and hope, and with what humiliating fear, that event was awaited, only those can understand who have sounded the deep, inexorable rivalry between these two women. On the 13th of October 1499 the child was born. It was a daughter, the Princess Claude of France. "Elle fut née en ma maison," writes Louisa in her diary. From that moment she determined the little girl should marry her boy Francis, and not some powerful foreign prince, who might forcibly break the Salic law. Naturally Anne was of a contrary opinion.

The Queen was young, was of Louise's own age, three-and-twenty. A son might be born to her to mock all Louisa's hopes and dreams. From this intense expectation neither one nor the other of these women was ever free. But the years went on, and no male child was given to Anne; then, one crucial morning, a son was born, but, writes Louisa in her journal, with an almost savage triumph, "he could not retard the exaltation of my Cæsar, for he had no life." Sharp anxiety and goading ambition had so changed by this time the gentle wife of Charles of Angoulême.

Louisa brought up her son as befitted a king. Her castle of Romorantin was scarcely large enough to hold the court and retinue of the young heir of France, and for this purpose the beautiful palace of Amboise was assigned to her by the King. As years went on, Louis grew to regard the young Count of Angoulême as his heir, and, despite the bitter jealousy of Queen Anne, he loved the boy, and treated him with care and kindness. He created Francis Duke of Valois; he consulted the child's taste with fatherly foresight; and when his young cousin came to court, Louis had the royal park filled with deer and game, so that Francis might not be debarred from his favourite pleasure of the chase.

Meanwhile, at Amboise, Francis was educated with the greatest nobles of France. Of these boy-companions, five, in especial, were to become conspicuous in the history of his life. Gaston de Foix, the King's nephew, "the thunderbolt of Italy" as people learned to call him, who, ten years later, in the flower of his youth, should perish in the moment of victory on the desolate Ravenna marshes. The light-hearted Bonnivet, Margaret's too daring lover, killed at Pavia. The brilliant and gay Philippe Brion, Sieur de Chabot, so often favoured and disgraced by Francis in later years. And, a more potent influence, Anne de Montmorency, the determined, stern, narrow-hearted boy, on whom his godmother, the Breton Queen, seemed to have bestowed her pure and relentless nature with her name. Lastly, the unfortunate Charles de Montpensier, the Bourbon cadet, whose passionate vindictive character and tragic Italian face betrayed the Gonzaga adventurer that doubled this French noble.

These boys were taught all things that befit young princes. Latin, courtly languages, hunting, the dance (music was as yet in embryo, a mere thrum of the lute or burr of the organ), jousting, tennis, tilting at the ring, fencing, and wrestling. At all their games there was one deeply interested looker on, one whom all strove to please, the Queen of the little court; this was Mademoiselle d’Angoulême.

At this time there was some talk of affiancing the little girl to the young Prince of Wales, afterwards Henry of England, eighth of the name. King Louis sent an embassy to the English court; Henry VII. despatched a special envoy to Paris; but though the English ambassador reported the little Princess "très belle et fort saige de son aage," nothing came of these negotiations. For Henry declared that though a daughter of Louis would be the alliance nearest to his heart, yet, while the King and Queen were still so young and vigorous, he could not consider Mademoiselle d'Angoulême as sister to the heir of France.

Nevertheless, with every day Francis became more evidently the heir, and at Plessis, on May 22nd, 1507, he married the little girl born at his mother's castle, in order to unite her inheritance of Brittany and Orleans with the crown. This was ample recognition, and yet the triumph of Louisa was not all sweetness, for we find her writing in her journal: "The 3rd August 1508, my son went from Amboise to live at court, and left me all alone."

Within the year the little Charles of Spain sent an embassy to King Louis, requesting the hand of Mademoiselle d'Angoulême. This would have been a far more brilliant alliance than the English match, and Louisa would gladly have given her consent. But the King refused. Perhaps he thought it dangerous to wed a French princess with the natural rival of France; very probably Anne, who still counted on Charles for some yet unborn daughter of her own, persuaded him not to break her heart and grant this second triumph to her rival. The heir of Spain was dismissed, and Queen Anne selected a very different bridegroom, more suitable in years, but not at all in spirit. This was Charles of Alençon, first Prince of the Blood, a duke with power of life and death in his duchy, almost a petty sovereign. He was a handsome, dull, inefficient youth of twenty, without ideas or presence, and of a brooding and jealous temper. There was, however, no ground for rejecting the choice of the Queen, eager to humiliate her insatiable rival. The Duke of Alençon was an honourable match for Mademoiselle d'Angoulême. Descended from that Charles I. of Valois who was made Count of Alençon by his brother Philip the Fair, Monsieur d'Alençon came of a house which for two centuries had been glorious and quasi-royal. And yet he was stupid and mean of spirit; a sad mate for the gay, brilliant, mystical girl he was to marry, whose tender radiance and smile of wistful rapture deserved a happier destiny. It was also a profound disappointment to Louisa that, having refused the King of Spain, her pearl of princesses should be given to a simple duke. Yet this came to pass—Margaret obediently suffering her dismal fate. So, for a while, mother and children were divided. Francis, living in impatient restraint at court; Louisa, filling her craving heart with infinite ambitions in her childless castle at Cognac; Margaret, unhappy, dispirited, drooping in her husband's palace at Alençon, far from the gaiety, the cultured intercourse, the love and happiness to which she had been accustomed all her life.

Margaret was now seventeen years old. She was not beautiful, but very charming. She was tall, graceful of carriage, slim and delicate in air. Her thick blonde hair was hidden away under a black coif; and this fashion gave a certain severity to her long pale face. The eyes, blue and expressive, smiled sweetly under arching brows. Her nose was the long, large nose of Francis, but more delicate and irregular in her, with a sort of ripple in it. She had a little, neatly rounded chin, and a very sweet mouth, with a wistful pathetic smile, well knowing the way "dire Nenny avec un doux sourire." Yet, despite her pensive countenance, she was—we have her word for it—"de moult joyeuse vie, quoique toutefois femme de bien."

At Alençon, alas! there was no joyous life. The Duke, gloomy, jealous, mediocre, interested merely in the details of his estate, was a respectable youth, but not the man to make a Margaret happy. She pursued her studies as the one means of escape from this irksome existence. Madame de Chatillon, her governess, had accompanied the young Duchess as first Lady of Honour. Under her direction, doubtless, Margaret began to give more and more of her attention to her favourite study of Divinity. Her mystical, indefinite mind was attracted towards religious speculation, and Madame de Chatillon was well acquainted with the New Ideas then already beginning to stir the soul of France. This lady was, in later years, suspected of Lutheranism, and it was said that she had secretly married the innovating Cardinal du Bellay. But as yet Lutheranism did not exist. She and her pupil, however, had gone forth to seek it.

Meanwhile, Louisa was perplexed with more earthly anxieties. In 1510 the nation became aware that a new heir might be expected to the Crown of France. These were months of exultation to Queen Anne, while Louisa understood how terribly all her ambitions would be overthrown should a royal prince be born. In October a little girl came into the world: Madame Renée de France. Then for a moment the anxiety of Louisa was appeased. But a worse trial was in store. The Queen never recovered that disappointment. Three years afterwards she died; and Louisa discovered that the death of her enemy had brought a new and terrible evil upon her. Nine months after the death of Anne, the King, who had mourned her with little less than frenzy, married Mary, the beautiful young sister of the English King. Louisa's hatred for this new rival, and her contempt for the King, are manifest even in the meagre lines of her diary.

"The 22nd September, King Louis XII., very old and feeble (fort antique et debiledébile), went out of Paris to meet his young wife Queen Mary.

"The 9th October, was held the amorous wedding of Louis, King of France, and Mary of England.

"The 3rd day of November 1514, before eleven o'clock, I arrived at Paris, and the self-same day, without resting, I was advised to go and salute Queen Mary at Saint Denis, and I left Paris at three o'clock with a great number of gentlemen.

"The 5th of November 1514, Queen Mary was crowned at Saint Denis, and the sixth day made her entry into Paris."

Then the journal no longer chronicles the triumphs of a rival.

"The first day of November 1515, my son was King of France."

Chapter 2

(1515–1520.)

THE YOUNG KING AND HIS RIVALS.

While the young Queen sat in her chamber, reading her missal, submitting to her mother-in-law, and embroidering red silken counterpanes, the Duchess of Alençon queened it over the court of France, the brilliant Egeria of half-a-dozen poets. For Claude, although the wife and daughter of a king, was none the less a quiet, narrow-chested girl, fifteen years old, gentle, pious, and awkward, with neat, pure features and smooth-braided hair that had no special charm or grace. Francis, with his ideas of splendour and chivalry, desired a different queen for his sumptuous court. And her he found in Margaret, a woman then of three-and-twenty, both learned and witty, and with a charm more attractive than beauty in her slender carriage and tender smile—Margaret, young, de moult joyeuse vie, et la meilleure compagnie possible. Margaret was virtually the Queen of France.

Hers was a dangerous although an honourable position. She was young, and, under the spell of that sweet pale face, that abundant soft blonde hair, her brother's courtiers called her the most beautiful of women. She was unhappily married, and possessed neither love nor esteem for her husband. She ruled without scruple the laxest court of Europe. Yet, singular among the women of that court, the Duchess of Alençon never had a lover.

The virtue of the young Princess, gay as she seemed, was quite secure. She looked on all her would-be lovers with a sweet, remote ironical compassion, and turned away to seek her books again. She had an almost pedantic love of learning; theology, grammar, classics, romances, she gave them each a share of the curiosity and interest with which she envisaged life. All these tastes and qualities helped to secure her virtue; but even greater than they as a safeguard we must place her absolute, unrivalled devotion to her brother.

It was the fashion then at court for people of quality to select a motto or device expressing their personality. Duchess Margaret was clever at making these posies; she supplied them to her brother, to his mistress, to half-a-dozen others. For herself, she selected a sunflower turning to the sun, and underneath she wrote, "Non inferiora secutus." The phrase is exact; no lower light did she ever follow, no wandering glory led her from the worship of that sun of hers. Through all history, I think, we never come again upon a devotion sustained so long and at so high a pitch as this of Margaret d'Angoulême for her brother. And this idolatry demanded many sacrifices. She was to offer it her life and her constant service, the interests of her husband, the happiness of her child. She offered it her judgment, almost her conscience. And for his sake, in her middle age, already weary of the world, she should forsake the mystical meditation in which she delighted, to compose the Heptameron to please him in his illness.

Louisa of Savoy was scarcely less devoted. As great a love and ambition filled her heart, but was met and thwarted there by other passions, by intenser personal cravings. She was not like Margaret, a sunflower, seeing only one object, turning only to that. She was a passionate, personal, violent woman—eager for love, eager for money, eager for power, yet subordinating these intense desires to her motherly ambition. Her passion was as strong as Margaret's devotion. Both these women lived only for the glory of Francis. Let us see of what stuff this idol was made.

There is, I believe, no good portrait of Francis in his youthful manhood. The face so familiar to us is of a later date: a dreadful face, with its sly and carnal look, the long coarse nose, and full voluptuous mouth. It seems as if some pressure of blood on the brain weighed down the eyelids over those small and narrow eyes, and inflamed those florid cheeks, over which the coarse dark hair falls down. A dreadful face truly—apoplectic, sensual, indifferent, cunning. But, from the frequent contemporary representations of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, we can believe that in 1520 the King looked different from this. Still slender, tall, and elegant in figure, he rode his horse gracefully, and was first in every pastime. His long face, with the small eyes, is not yet swollen and reddened by indulgence and disease. It has, indeed, a gentle, benevolent, and royal expression; an air of kind knightliness: and this is the pose which Francis affected. He was to be the Amadis of kings. He was brave to folly, ideally rash in love and in war; he was fantastically honourable. A story in the Heptameron relates how, having disco in his court a stranger who had conspired to murder him, Francis gave a great hunt, and, leading the traitor aside to a lonely glade, he offered to cross swords with him in fair fight, and then sent him pardoned away. Such stories as these captivated the popular imagination; and the splendid court of Francis, his love of art, his taste in architecture, his considerable skill in poetry, all this completed the national enchantment; for France, notwithstanding her love of thrift, has ever demanded glory or magnificence from her rulers. Also the person of the King was widely known. His habit of traversing the country through and through, hunting, pleasuring, inspecting frontiers, made all men acquainted with their monarch. And the nation, delighted with his showy chivalry, found their Prince a picturesque object for devotion.

But woe to those who expected more solid qualities from Francis. Fickle and variable as he was versatile, he veered from point to point with every wind. At bottom a profoundly indifferent nature, he cared only for the convenience of the moment. He accepted devotion gracefully, but it did not occur to him to repay it. His confidence was the one reward he bestowed on those who gave their lives to him; and this went far with the women who adored him. It gave them an exquisite sense of participation in his interest. He kept his grateful sister all her life travelling from province to province en commis-voyageur de royauté. He left half the cares of his country to his mother. But woe to any who, in her hour of need, expected to receive a like aid or service from the King. The Queen of Navarre never got her kingdom from him. Madame de Chateaubriand, in her dreadful prison guarded by her jealous and ferocious husband, was left to die without a word. A certain Louise de Crevecœur discovered too late the heartlessness of her lover. "Do you not know?" she writes, "that those in prison make use of poison; my children and I eat nothing without I find an antidote for our food. It is for my love of you that they hurt me thus; and you endure it. This is sharper to me than the pain that I suffer." How terrible a light this chance-found letter casts on the figure of the gay, handsome, brave young Amadis who was at this time the hero of Europe. "It is for my love of you that they hurt me thus; and you endure it!" From many an honest servant of Francis this cry must have gone up; for neither gratitude nor pity beat under that dinted breast-plate of his. Yet, after all these years, knowing the end, and despite our great contempt, we feel the glamour that surrounds the figure of this ardent young poet and soldier, this brilliant hero of the Renaissance. And how much more did not his radiance blind the women who adored him as their hero and their king!

"Scrivere a Luisa di Savoia è come scrivere alla stessa Trinità." So wrote the witty, blasphemous Cardinal Bibbiena. And it was true. Francis repaid the love and service of his worshippers by his confidence. Louisa and Margaret were scarcely less powerful than himself. On all political questions he consulted these contrasted minds: the violent, autocratic Louisa, and Margaret the modest and humane. Unconsciously to themselves, these different natures paralysed each other; and the policy of Francis is a brilliant tissue of inconsistencies, uncertainties, and sudden disasters.

Francis, though so newly King of France, did not forget that by inheritance he was, also, through his descent from Valentina Visconti, hereditary Duke of Milan. The Sforzas, the successful usurpers, claimed possession as nine points of the law, and Maximilian the Emperor demanded Milan by right of his overlordship. Each was equally resolved to possess in that city the key of Italy. But these words, Milan, Italy, meant more to Francis than a mere political position. To his intensely artistic temperament, a corner of Italy was more precious than the whole of France. Milan to him meant beauty, poetry; gardened villas in which to pass a soft abandoned leisure; women more fair than those of his kingdom; churches and palaces which he, the great builder, knew how to value; lax and subtle Lombard art. From the first days to the last of his life the thought of Milan haunted him like a passion, and to the shadow of unpossessed Italy he constantly sacrificed his substantial realm of France. His first hazard ended in success, and made the name of the little town of Marignano a word to conjure with in France. No sooner was his reign begun, than with Lautrec and with Bayard, with the chivalry of France, the young King resolved to conquer his longed-for inheritance. He sent Bayard in advance with La Palice. No sooner did they set foot in Piedmont than they took prisoner Prospero Colonna, the general of the Swiss in the pay of Maximilian Sforza. When this news reached Francis, who was at Lyons with his mother, his sister, and his wife, nothing could restrain him from marching into Italy. He sent his wife, who was near her confinement, with Louis and Margaret, to the familiar palace of Amboise. He left Louisa—"Madame" as she was now styled—Regent of France, bade them farewell, and soon was in the mountains. He arrived in Lombardy in time to follow up the successes of Bayard and La Palice. The Swiss, rumoured invincible, had gathered in large reinforcements to defend Milan. Near Marignano the French under Francis encountered them. "It was," says General Trivulzio, "a battle of giants. They fought all night."

"The 13th of September, which was Thursday, 1515," writes the proud mother in her journal, "my son vanquished and defeated the Swiss near Milan; the battle began at five hours after noon; it lasted all the night and the morrow until eleven o'clock in the morning; and this very day I left Amboise to go on foot to Nostre Dame des Fontaines, to commend to her that which I love more than myself. It is my son, glorious and triumphant Cæsar, subjugator of the Helvetians.

"Sunday, the 14th of October, of the year 1515, Maximilian, son of the late Louis Sforza, was besieged in the Castle of Milan by the French, and made a conditional surrender to my son.

"The 14th of December 1515 my son took the oath of peace with the King of England2."

Thus, a year after his accession, we find Francis a conqueror in Italy, at peace with the Great Powers, adored and glorified in France; so begins his reign.

There were in Europe at this time two other sovereigns, young and rich, though without the brilliant elegance of the French monarch. Europe lay, in fact, at the feet of these three youths, two of them caring for little else but war as a chivalrous game, and peace as magnificent leisure; while the third was equally uninspired by public spirit, being engrossed already with the dreams of a subtle and tremendous ambition.

In 1519 the old Emperor Maximilian died, and each of these three kings stood forward to contest the Empire.

The eldest of them was Henry of England, eighth of the name. He was twenty-eight years of age, handsome, tall, blond, and ruddy. "His features," says Ludovico Falier, "are not merely beautiful—they are angelic." Robust in figure, he did not yet show signs of the extravagant corpulence of his middle age. He was vigorous and active in all sports, vain, jealous, arrogant, but as yet the arrogance seemed only a bluff English sort of dignity. Handsome, rich, and valiant as he was, Henry had not much chance for the empire. His kingdom was not a large enough state. "No one was on the side of the King of England," says Fleurange.

The real rival of Francis was Charles of Austria, King of Spain. These two were rivals, not only for the empire, but for Burgundy, for Milan, for Navarre, and for the Netherlands. They were nearly equal in power, for, while the domain of Charles was the vaster, that of Francis was more homogeneous and more compact. In temperament as different as in interests, each was born to be the antagonist of the other.

Charles was the youngest of the three. Born in 1500, he was nineteen years old at the time of the death of his grandfather. In the previous year, on the decease of his mother's father, Ferdinand, he had succeeded to the crown of Spain, for, though his mother was recognised as Queen, she was unfit to govern. She was that poor mad Queen of Arragon, who mourned so tragically the brutal Austrian husband who ill-used her. Charles was brought up far from the fantastic neighbourhood of his mother. He and his sister were given into the care of his father's sister, the politic Margaret of Austria, who educated them in the Netherlands, where she ruled as Maximilian's governor. But all her care and healthy influence could not prevent Charles from inheriting the sombre temperament of Juana. The man who, when Emperor of half the world, should turn monk and dwell in the Escurial, was as a boy without brilliance, without activity, without fire; a pale, taciturn, studious lad, he seemed no formidable rival. "Un quidam certain petit roi," said the French, and laughed in their sleeves. They did not notice his hungry eyes, his powerful chin; they did not see the subtlety and power of combination which this pious, quiet lad inherited from Ferdinand and Isabel—the rare outbursts of determined energy which showed him the grandson of the fiery Max. He was, in truth, a most formidable adversary.