ing above all the power of Spain and
eager to grasp the opportunity of breaking it by a seizure of the
Netherlands, Charles listened to the counsels of Coligni, who pressed
for war upon Philip and promised the support of the Huguenots in an
invasion of the Low Countries. Never had a fairer prospect opened to
French ambition. But Catharine had no mind to be set aside. To her cool
political temper the supremacy of the Huguenots seemed as fatal to the
Crown as the supremacy of the Catholics. A triumph of Calvinism in the
Netherlands, wrought out by the swords of the French Calvinists, would
decide not only the religious but the political destinies of France; and
Catharine saw ruin for the monarchy in a France at once Protestant and
free. She suddenly united with the Guises and suffered them to rouse the
fanatical mob of Paris, while she won back the king by picturing the
royal power as about to pass into the hands of Coligni. On the
twenty-fourth of August, St. Bartholomew's day, the plot broke out in an
awful massacre. At Paris the populace murdered Coligni and almost all
the Huguenot leaders. A hundred thousand Protestants fell as the fury
spread from town to town. In that awful hour Philip and Catholicism were
saved. The Spanish king laughed for joy. The new Pope, Gregory the
Thirteenth, ordered a _Te Deum_ to be sung. Instead of conquering the
Netherlands France plunged madly back into a chaos of civil war, and the
Low Countries were left to cope single-handed with the armies of Spain.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and the Netherlands.]

They could look for no help from Elizabeth. Whatever enthusiasm the
heroic struggle of the Prince of Orange for their liberties excited
among her subjects, it failed to move Elizabeth even for an instant from
the path of cold self-interest. To her the revolt of the Netherlands was
simply "a bridle of Spain, which kept war out of our own gate." At the
darkest moment of the contest, when Alva had won back all but Holland
and Zealand and even William of Orange despaired, the Queen bent her
energies to prevent him from finding succour in France. That the Low
Countries could in the end withstand Philip, neither she nor any English
statesmen believed. They held that the struggle must close either in
their subjection to him, or in their selling themselves for aid to
France; and the accession of power which either result must give to one
of her two Catholic foes the Queen was eager to avert. Her plan