Scott, however, willfully carved history to suit the purposes of
his story; and in these days we have come to feel that a story must
earn a certain amount of credibility by being in keeping with
established facts, even if striking events have to be sacrificed,
and that the order of time must be preserved. In Shakespeare's
days, or even in Scott's, it might have been possible to bring
Henry III. and his mignons to due punishment within the limits of
a tale beginning with the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; but in 1868
the broad outlines of tragedy must be given up to keep within the
bounds of historical verity.
How far this has been done, critics better read than myself must
decide. I have endeavoured to speak fairly, to the best of my
ability, of such classes of persons as fell in with the course of
the narrative, according to such lights as the memoirs of the time
afford. The Convent is scarcely a CLASS portrait, but the
condition of it seems to be justified by hints in the Port Royal
memoirs, respecting Maubuisson and others which Mere Angelique
reformed. The intolerance of the ladies at Montauban is described
in Madame Duplessis-Mornay's life; and if Berenger's education and
opinions are looked on as not sufficiently alien from Roman
Catholicism, a reference to Froude's 'History of Queen Elizabeth'
will show both that the customs of the country clergy, and likewise
that a broad distinction was made by the better informed among the
French between Calvinism and Protestantism or Lutheranism, in which
they included Anglicanism. The minister Gardon I do not consider
as representing his class. He is a POSSIBILITY modified to serve
the purposes of the story.
Into historical matters, however, I have only entered so far as my
story became involved with them. And here I have to apologize for
a few blunders, detected too late for alteration even in the
volumes. Sir Francis Walsingham was a young rising statesman in
1572, instead of the elderly sage he is represented; his daughter
Frances was a mere infant, and Sir Philip Sidney was not knighted
till much later. For the rest, I have tried to show the scenes
that shaped themselves before me as carefully as I could; though of
course they must not be a presentiment of the times themselves, but
of my notion of them.
C. M. Yonge November 14th, 1868