t. In the East his trouble from
the pressure of the Turks seemed brought to an end by a brilliant
victory at Lepanto in which his fleet with those of Venice and the Pope
annihilated the fleet of the Sultan. He could throw his whole weight
upon the Calvinism of the West, and above all upon France, where the
Guises were fast sinking into mere partizans of Spain. The common danger
drew France and England together; and Catharine of Medicis strove to
bind the two countries in one political action by offering to Elizabeth
the hand of her son Henry, the Duke of Anjou. But at this moment of
danger the whole situation was changed by the rising of the Netherlands.
Driven to despair by the greed and persecution of Alva, the Low
Countries rose in a revolt which after strange alternations of fortune
gave to the world the Republic of the United Provinces. Of the
Protestants driven out by the Duke's cruelties, many had taken to the
seas and cruised as pirates in the Channel, making war on Spanish
vessels under the flag of the Prince of Orange. Like the Huguenot
privateers who had sailed under Conde's flag, these freebooters found
shelter in the English ports. But in the spring of 1572 Alva demanded
their expulsion; and Elizabeth, unable to resist, sent them orders to
put to sea. The Duke's success proved fatal to his master's cause. The
"water-beggars," a little band of some two hundred and fifty men, were
driven by stress of weather into the Meuse. There they seized the city
of Brill, and repulsed a Spanish force which strove to recapture it. The
repulse was the signal for a general rising. All the great cities of
Holland and Zealand drove out their garrisons. The northern Provinces of
Gelderland, Overyssel, and Friesland, followed their example, and by the
summer half of the Low Countries were in revolt.

[Sidenote: The massacre of St. Bartholomew.]

A yet greater danger threatened Alva in the south, where Mons had been
surprised by Lewis of Nassau, and where the Calvinists were crying for
support from the Huguenots of France. The opening which their rising
afforded was seized by the Huguenot leaders as a political engine to
break the power which Catharine of Medicis exercised over Charles the
Ninth, and to set aside her policy of religious balance by placing
France at the head of Protestantism in the West. Weak and passionate in
temper, jealous of the warlike fame which his brother, the Duke of
Anjou, had won at Montcontour, dread