_Queen Brunequilda._
LXIX. Queen Brunequilda of France is execrated by nearly all sorts
of authors as the worst woman the world ever knew. The wickednesses
they attribute to her are innumerable and enormous; an unbridled lust,
which attended her from her early youth till she attained the age of
seventy-one; a furious ambition, to which she sacrificed all obligations,
both human and divine; an outrageous cruelty, which sacrificed as victims
to her resentment or ambition infinite numbers of innocent people, by
poison or the dagger, and among them some of royal race. Who could
imagine that any one would venture to stand up in defence of a woman, the
relation of whose conduct has stained the page of all histories, which
speak of her, with blood? Notwithstanding this, there appears an evidence
on her behalf, whose testimony, if you give it the credit his merit and
character intitle him to, will avert the force of the accusation, and
cause it to vanish in smoke. This is the great Gregory, who, in two
letters he wrote to that queen, covers her with eulogiums, and goes
so far in one of them, as to congratulate the French nation upon the
happiness of being governed by a queen, who was an illustrious pattern
of all kinds of virtues: _Præ aliis gentibus gentem Francorum asserimus
felicem, quæ sic bonis omnibus præditam meruit habere reginam._ (lib. 1.
epist. 8.) It is proper to observe, that the date of these letters, is
posterior some years to the perpetration of most of the iniquities with
which Brunequilda is charged.