Catharine and Philip's queen were exchanging
costly civilities at Bayonne, the Turks were engaged in a siege of Malta,
which has become famous for the obstinacy with which it was prosecuted and
the valor with which it was repelled. Spain had sent a small detachment of
troops to the assistance of the grand master, Jean de la Valette, and his
brave knights of St. John, and the Pope had contributed ten thousand
crowns to their expenses.[397] Yet at this very moment an envoy of the
Sultan was at the court of the Very Christian King of France, greatly to
the disgust of the Spanish visitors and pious Catholics in general,[398]
and only waited for the departure of Isabella and Alva to receive formal
presentation to the monarch and his mother.[399]

[Sidenote: The constable espouses Cardinal Chatillon's defence.]

Meantime, although the queen mother continued her policy of depriving the
Huguenots of one after another of the privileges to which they were
entitled, and replaced Protestant governors of towns and provinces by
Roman Catholics, her efforts at repression seemed, for the time at least,
to produce little effect. "The true religion is so rooted in France,"
wrote one who accompanied the royal progress, "that, like a fire, it
kindles daily more and more. In every place, from Bayonne hither, and for
the most part of the journey, there are more Huguenots than papists, and
the most part of men of quality and mark be of the religion." If the
writer, as is probable, was over-sanguine in his anticipations, he could
not be mistaken in the size of the great gathering of Protestants--full
two thousand--for the most part gentlemen and gentlewomen, which he
witnessed with his own eyes, brought together at Nantes to listen to the
preaching of the eloquent Perucel.[400] And it was not an insignificant
proof of the futility of any direct attempt to crush the Huguenots, that
Constable Montmorency pretty plainly intimated that there were limits
which religious proscription must not transcend. The English ambassador
wrote from France, late in November, that the Pope's new nuncio had within
two days demanded that the red cap should be taken from the Cardinal of
Chatillon. But the latter, who chanced to be at court, replied that "what
he enjoyed he enjoyed by gift of the crown of France, wherewith the Pope
had nothing to do." The old constable was even more vehement. "The Pope,"
said he, "has often troubled the quiet of this realm, but I tru