Meantime poor Francesco was, if anything, rather worse off than all the illegitimate serene highnesses. For those wicked and unprincipled confounders of all distinctions agreed together to call each other serene, while nobody would call him so. It was a cruel case; and the Grand Duke, we read,[203] shook with rage, at the thought of all the trouble he had taken, and all the money he had spent in procuring this title, only to find himself after all no serener than his neighbours.
But the cruellest cut of all was to hear that some of these vile pretenders had obtained recognition of their false serenity at the court of France, at the hands of a Medici, and she the head of his house! He sent an envoy to Paris, who under pretext of asking payment of certain moneys lent by him to Charles IX., was to see if the queen–mother could be got to favour his views in the title question. But Catherine replied to his first hint of the matter, that "she did not see how she could do anything for the Grand Duke in that business, seeing that he could give the King of Spain a million of gold at a time, while with her and her son, on the other hand, he looked after so small a matter as that which they owed." The envoy humbly observed that the King of Spain had not done his master the ill–turn in the title business which the Queen had done. "And I did it on purpose," rejoined Catherine, "in return for the small respect the Duke has paid me and my son, in committing assassinations beneath our eyes. And you may write to your master, that he do nothing of the sort again, and specially that he lay hand on no man within this realm; for the King, my son, will not endure it." So Francesco took nothing by that motion.
He carried his complaints next to the Emperor Rodolph II.; begging, that in the Diet shortly to be held, some curb might be put on the usurpations and abuses, which threatened, he said, to make all equal, and leave no distinctions of rank at all. The Duke of Urbino now asserted that he too was as serene as his neighbours; and there was reason to fear that the viceroy of Naples, and even the governor of Milan, would soon be putting forth the same pretensions. He urged on the consideration of the Emperor, that "the distinction of ranks and precedences was so necessary and profoundly based in the very nature of things, that even in hell there were found to be such distinctions among the devils and the damned."[204] And one cannot but feel the force of the argument in the mouth of Francesco, that what was good for devils must be good for dukes.