So long as her enemies could be employed in exterminating each other, she was willing to defer the extermination of the Huguenots.

The great massacre of St.Bartholomew was to sleep for seven years longer.
Alva was, to be sure, much encouraged at first by the language of the French princes and nobles who were present at Bayonne.

Monluc protested that "they might saw the Queen Dowager in two before she would become Huguenot." Montpensier exclaimed that "he would be cut in pieces for Philip's service--that the Spanish monarch was the only hope for France," and, embracing Alva with fervor, he affirmed that "if his body were to be opened at that moment, the name of Philip would be found imprinted upon his heart." The Duke, having no power to proceed to an autopsy, physical or moral, of Montpensier's interior, was left somewhat in the dark, notwithstanding these ejaculations.

His first conversation with the youthful King, however, soon dispelled his hopes.

He found immediately, in his own words, that Charles the Ninth "had been doctored." To take up arms, for religious reasons, against his own subjects, the monarch declared to be ruinous and improper.