He said that he longed for a combat to decide the issue, and that he had charged Count de Brissac to tell Mayenne that he would give a finger of his right hand for a battle, and two for a general peace.

He knew and pitied the sufferings of Paris, but the horrors now raging there were to please the King of Spain.

That monarch had told the Duke of Parma to trouble himself but little about the Netherlands so long as he could preserve for him his city of Paris.
But it was to lean on a broken reed to expect support from this old, decrepit king, whose object was to dismember the flourishing kingdom of France, and to divide it among as many tyrants as he had sent viceroys to the Indies.

The crown was his own birthright.

Were it elective he should receive the suffrages of the great mass of the electors.