If your Majesty, on account of your Netherlands, is not afraid of putting arms into the hands of the Guise family in France, there need be less objection to sending one of that house into England, particularly as you will send forces of your own into that kingdom, by the reduction of which the affairs of Flanders will be secured.

To effect the pacification of the Netherlands the sooner, it would be desirable to conquer England as early as October." Having thus sufficiently enlarged upon the sincerity of the French King and his prime minister, in their dark projects against a friendly power, and upon the ease with which that friendly power could be subjected, the ambassador begged for a reply from his royal master without delay.

He would be careful, meantime, to keep the civil war alive in France--thus verifying the poetical portrait of himself, the truth of which he had just been so indignantly and rhetorically denying--but it was desirable that the French should believe that this civil war was not Philip's sole object.

He concluded by drawing his master's attention to the sufferings of the English Catholics.

"I cannot refrain," he said, "from placing before your eyes the terrible persecutions which the Catholics are suffering in England; the blood of the martyrs flowing in so many kinds of torments; the groans of the prisoners, of the widows and orphans; the general oppression and servitude, which is the greatest ever endured by a people of God, under any tyrant whatever.