Everybody lauds his courage, his vigilance, his steadiness in war, and his coolness, a quality wonderfully rare in a Frenchman.

His peculiar defects are, first of all, stinginess towards soldiers; then he makes large promises, and even when he means to keep his promise he is infinitely slow about it." To the sketch of the Cardinal of Lorraine Brantome adds that he was, "as indeed he said, a coward by nature." a strange defect in a Guise.
It was a great deal, towards securing the supremacy of a great family and its leading members, to thus possess the favor of the court and the functions of government; but the power of the Guises had a still higher origin and a still deeper foundation.

"It was then," said Michael de Castelnau, one of the most intelligent and most impartial amongst the chroniclers of the sixteenth century, "that schism and divisions in religious matters began to be mixed up with affairs of state.

Well, all the clergy of France, and nearly all the noblesse and the people who belonged to the Roman religion, considered that the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise were, as it were, called of God to preserve the Catholic religion established in France for the last twelve hundred years.

And it seemed to them not only an act of impiety to change or alter it in any way whatever, but also an impossibility to do so without ruin to the state.