olent plans.]

[Sidenote: Cardinal Granvelle's testimony.]

So far, then, was the general belief which has been adopted by the
greater number of historians up to our own days from being correct--the
belief that Catharine framed, at the Bayonne conference, with Alva's
assistance, a plan for the extermination of the Protestants by a massacre
such as was realized on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572--that, on the
contrary, the queen mother refused, in a peremptory manner that disgusted
the Spanish fanatics, every proposition that looked like violence. That we
have not read the correspondence of Alva incorrectly, and that no letter
containing the mythical agreement of Catharine ever reached Philip, is
proved by the tone of the letters that passed between the great agents in
the work of persecution in the Spanish Netherlands. Cardinal Granvelle,
who, in his retreat at Besancon, was kept fully informed by the King of
Spain, or by his chief ministers, of every important event, and who
received copies of all the most weighty documents, in a letter to Alonso
del Canto expresses great regret that Isabella and Alva should have failed
in their endeavor to induce Catharine de' Medici to adopt methods more
proper than she was taking to remedy the religious ills of France. She
promised marvels, he adds, but was determined to avoid recourse to arms,
which, indeed, was not necessary, if she would only act as she should. He
was persuaded that the plan she was adopting would entail the ruin of
religion and of her son's throne.[381]

[Sidenote: Festivities and pageantry.]

While the policy of two of the most important nations on the face of the
globe, in which were involved the interests, temporal and eternal, of
millions of men, women, and children, formed the topic of earnest
discussion between two women--a mother and her daughter, the mother yet to
become infamous for her participation in a bloody tragedy of which she as
yet little dreamed--and a Spanish grandee doomed to an equally unenviable
immortality in the records of human suffering and human crime, the city of
Bayonne was the scene of an ephemeral gayety that might well convey the
impression that such merry-making was not only the sole object of the
conference, but the great concern of life.[382] Two nations, floundering
in hopeless bankruptcy, yet found money enough to lavish upon costly but
unmeaning pageants, while many a noble, to satisfy an ostentatious
display, made drafts whi