rine and her
daughter Isabella, wife of Philip the Second. Catharine's first proposal
had been that her royal son-in-law should himself be present. She had
urged that great good to Christendom might flow from their deliberations.
Philip the Prudent, however, and his confidential adviser, the Duke of
Alva, were suspicious of the design. Alva was convinced that Catharine
had only her own private ends in view.[361] Granvelle observed that little
fruit came of these interviews of princes but discord and confusion, and
judged that, had not the queen mother strenuously insisted upon improving
perhaps the only opportunity which she and her daughter might enjoy of
seeing each other, even the interview between the two queens would have
been declined.[362] As it was, however, Philip excused himself on the plea
of engrossing occupations.

Such were the circumstances under which the Bayonne conference took
place--a meeting which Cardinal Granvelle assured his correspondents was a
simple visit of a daughter to her mother,[363] but to which
contemporaries, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, ascribed a far deeper
significance. At this meeting, according to Jean de Serres, writing only
four or five years after the event,[364] a holy league, as it was called,
was formed, by the intervention of Isabella, for the purpose of
re-establishing the authority of the ancient religion and of extirpating
the new. France and Spain mutually promised to render each other
assistance in the good work; and both pledged themselves to the support of
the Holy See by all the means in their power. Philip himself was not
present, either, it was conjectured, in order that the league might the
better be kept secret, or to avoid the appearance of lowering his dignity
before that of the French monarch.[365] The current belief--until
recently almost the universal belief of historians--goes farther, and
alleges that in this mysterious conference Catharine and Alva, who
accompanied his master's wife, concocted the plan of that famous massacre
whose execution was delayed by various circumstances for seven years. Alva
was the tempter, and the words with which he recommended his favorite
method of dealing with heresy, by destroying its chief upholders, were
embodied in the ignoble sentence, "Better a salmon's head than ten
thousand frogs."[366]

In fact, a general impression that the conference had led to the formation
of a distinct plan for the universal destruction