trong enough to enforce their conditions on the
candidates; and it was thought that they would be able to decide the
election, and obtain a king of their own choosing. Alva's reign of
Terror had failed to pacify the Low Countries, and he was about to
resign the hopeless task to an incapable successor. The taking of the
Brill in April was the first of those maritime victories which led to
the independence of the Dutch. Mons fell in May; and in July the
important province of Holland declared for the Prince of Orange. The
Catholics believed that all was lost if Alva remained in command.[8]

The decisive struggle was in France. During the minority of Charles IX.
persecution had given way to civil war, and the Regent, his mother, had
vainly striven, by submitting to neither party, to uphold the authority
of the Crown. She checked the victorious Catholics, by granting to the
Huguenots terms which constituted them, in spite of continual disaster
in the field, a vast and organised power in the State. To escape their
influence it would have been necessary to invoke the help of Philip
II., and to accept protection which would have made France subordinate
to Spain. Philip laboured to establish such an alliance; and it was to
promote this scheme that he sent his queen, Elizabeth of Valois, to meet
her mother at Bayonne. In 1568 Elizabeth died; and a rumour came to
Catherine touching the manner of her death which made it hard to listen
to friendly overtures from her husband. Antonio Perez, at that time an
unscrupulous instrument of his master's will, afterwards accused him of
having poisoned his wife. "On parle fort sinistrement de sa mort, pour
avoir ete advancee," says Brantome. After the massacre of the
Protestants, the ambassador at Venice, a man distinguished as a jurist
and a statesman, reproached Catherine with having thrown France into the
hands of him in whom the world recognised her daughter's murderer.
Catherine did not deny the truth of the report. She replied that she was
"bound to think of her sons in preference to her daughters, that the
foul-play was not fully proved, and that if it were it could not be
avenged so long as France was weakened by religious discord."[9] She
wrote as she could not have written if she had been convinced that the
suspicion was unjust.

When Charles IX. began to be his own master he seemed resolved to follow
his father and grandfather in their hostility to the Spanish Power. He
wrote to a