that your
Majesty might receive Divine support in this great affair. I went to see
him next morning, and as soon as I came into his presence he began to
laugh, and with demonstrations of extreme contentment, to praise your
Majesty as deserving your title of Most Christian, telling me there was
no King worthy to be your Majesty's companion, either for valor or
prudence. He praised the steadfast resolution and the long dissimulation
of so great an enterprise, which all the world would not be able to
comprehend."

"I thanked him," continued the embassador, "and I said that I thanked God
for enabling your Majesty to prove to his Master that his apprentice had
learned his trade, and deserved his title of most Christian King. I
added, that he ought to confess that he owed the preservation of the
Netherlands to your Majesty."

Nothing certainly could, in Philip's apprehension, be more delightful
than this most unexpected and most opportune intelligence. Charles IX.,
whose intrigues in the Netherlands he had long known, had now been
suddenly converted by this stupendous crime into his most powerful ally,
while at the same time the Protestants of Europe would learn that there
was still another crowned head in Christendom more deserving of
abhorrence than himself. He wrote immediately to Alva, expressing his
satisfaction that the King of France had disembarrassed himself of such
pernicious men, because he would now be obliged to cultivate the
friendship of Spain, neither the English Queen nor the German Protestants
being thenceforth capable of trusting him. He informed the Duke,
moreover, that the French envoy, Saint Goard, had been urging him to
command the immediate execution of Genlis and his companions, who had
been made prisoners, as well as all the Frenchmen who would be captured
in Mons; and that he fully concurred in the propriety of the measure.
"The sooner," said Philip, "these noxious plants are extirpated from the
earth, the less fear there is that a fresh crop will spring up." The
monarch therefore added, with his own hand, to the letter, "I desire that
if you have not already disembarrassed the world of them, you will do it
immediately, and inform me thereof, for I see no reason why it should be
deferred."

This is the demoniacal picture painted by the French ambassador, and by
Philip's own hand, of the Spanish monarch's joy that his "Most Christian"
brother had just murdered twenty-five thousand of his own subje