But while the campaign dragged on, Philip won the decisive battle of S.Quentin.The Guise hurried back to France, and Alva marched unresisted upon Rome.

There was no reason why the Eternal City should not have been subjected to another siege and sack.

The will was certainly not wanting in Alva to humiliate the Pope, who never spoke of Spaniards but as renegade Jews, Marrani, heretics, and personifications of pride.

Philip, however, wrote reminding his general that the date of his birth (1527) was that of Rome's calamity, and vowing that he would not signalize the first year of his reign by inflicting fresh miseries upon the capital of Christendom.

Alva was ordered to make peace on terms both honorable and advantageous to his Holiness; since the King of Spain preferred to lose the rights of his own crown rather than to impair those of the Holy See in the least particular.