entury is hardly
conceivable at this day. The Puritans of England and the Huguenots of
France regarded Spain as their natural enemy, and on the high seas and
in the British Channel they joined hands with godless freebooters to
rifle her ships, kill her sailors, or throw them alive into the sea.
Spain on her side seized English Protestant sailors who ventured into
her ports, and burned them as heretics, or consigned them to a living
death in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Yet in the latter half of
the century these mutual outrages went on for years while the nations
professed to be at peace. There was complaint, protest, and occasional
menace, but no redress, and no declaration of war.

Contemporary writers of good authority have said that, when the news of
the massacres in Florida reached the court of France, Charles the
Ninth and Catherine de Medicis submitted to the insult in silence; but
documents lately brought to light show that a demand for redress was
made, though not insisted on. A cry of horror and execration had risen
from the Huguenots and many even of the Catholics had echoed it; yet the
perpetrators of the crime, and not its victims, were the first to make
complaint. Philip the Second resented the expeditions of Ribaut and
Laudonniere as an invasion of the American domains of Spain, and ordered
D'Alava, his ambassador at Paris, to denounce them to the French
King. Charles, thus put on the defensive, replied, that the country
in question belonged to France, having been discovered by Frenchmen a
hundred years before, and named by them Terre des Bretons. This alludes
to the tradition that the Bretons and Basques visited the northern
coasts of America before the voyage of Columbus. In several maps of the
sixteenth century the region of New England and the neighboring states
and provinces is set down as Terre des Bretons, or Tierra de los
Bretones, and this name was assumed by Charles to extend to the Gulf of
Mexico, as the name of Florida was assumed by the Spaniards to extend to
the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and even beyond it. Philip spurned the claim,
asserted the Spanish right to all Florida, and asked whether or not the
followers of Ribaut and Laudonniere had gone thither by authority of
their King. The Queen Mother, Catherine de Medicis, replied in her son's
behalf, that certain Frenchmen had gone to a country called Terre aux
Bretons, discovered by French subjects, and that in so doing they had
been warned