waiting for the best opportunity of
effecting their ruin; for even intelligent Roman Catholics, who were not
admitted into the confidence of the chief actors in that celebrated
interview, came to the same conclusion. Those who knew what had actually
been said and done might assure the world that the rumors were false; but
the more they asseverated the less they were believed. For it is one of
the penalties of insincere and lying diplomacy, that when once appreciated
in its true character--as it generally is appreciated in a very brief
space of time--it loses its persuasive power, and is treated without much
investigation as uniform imposture.[418] With a suspicious vigilance, bred
of the very treachery of which they had so often been the victims, the
Huguenots saw signs of dangers that perhaps were not actually in
preparation for them. And certainly there was enough to alarm. Not many
months after the assembly of Moulins a cut-throat by the name of Du May
was discovered and executed, who had been hired to murder Admiral Coligny,
the most indispensable leader of the party, near his own castle of
Chatillon-sur-Loing.[419] The last day of the year there was hung a
lackey, who pretended that the Cardinal of Lorraine had tried to induce
him to poison the Prince of Porcien; and, although he retracted his
statements at the time of his "amende honorable,"[420] his first story was
generally credited. The rumor was current that in December, 1566, Charles
received special envoys from the emperor, the Pope, and the King of Spain,
warning him that, unless he should revoke his edict of toleration, they
would declare themselves his open enemies.[421] This was certainly
sufficiently incredible, so far as the tolerant Maximilian was concerned;
but stranger mutations of policy had often been noticed, and, as to Pius
the Fifth and Philip, nothing seemed more probable.

[Sidenote: Alva in the Netherlands.]

[Sidenote: The Swiss levy.]

With the opening of the year 1567 the portentous clouds of coming danger
assumed a more definite shape. In the neighboring provinces of the
Netherlands, after a long period of procrastination, Philip the Second had
at length determined to strike a decisive blow. The Duchess of Parma was
to be superseded in the government by a man better qualified than any
other in Europe for the bloody work assigned him to do. Ferdinando de
Toledo, Duke of Alva, in his sixtieth year, after a life full of brilliant
militar