The lad was but seventeen—­a swarthy, pock-marked youth—­and Elizabeth was inclined at first to resent the way in which Anjou had flouted her.  She was thirty-nine, and her vanity was wounded; but yet the friendship or neutrality of France was vital to her.  “How tall is he?” she asked Cecil.  “About as tall as I am,” replied the elderly minister.  “As tall as your grandson, you mean!” snapped the queen.  But Walsingham, Smith, and the French envoys plied her busily with descriptions of Alencon’s manly charms, and a treaty between France and England was settled by which the Huguenots for a time became paramount in France conjointly with the marriage of the Huguenot Henry of Navarre with Margaret, the king’s sister.  Feasts and cordiality were the rules on both sides of the Channel now, and the Huguenot leaders urged the Alencon match with Elizabeth with all their force.  In reply to all these offers, Elizabeth replied that, though the discrepancy of age was a great drawback, yet the pock-marks on the suitor’s face were a greater objection still; yet if he would let her see him, without a pledge, she might like him.  She would never, she said, marry a man she had not seen.

But already Charles IX. and his mother were chafing under the Huguenot yoke and cooling towards England.  They were determined not to be drawn by their new treaty with England into war with Spain; so, under the pretence of keeping up the negotiations for the Alencon match, they sent the youth La Mole to England in the autumn of 1572, really for the purpose of dissociating France from the Huguenot-English aid to the Protestant Netherlanders.  La Mole was a gallant young lover, with whom Elizabeth was charmed, and when he played the vicarious wooer for Alencon, she could not make enough of him.  But whilst he was philandering with her at Kenilworth, and she was losing patience at his political mission, there fell like a thunderbolt the awful news of the massacre of St. Bartholomew at Navarre’s fatal wedding.  At once the scene changed.  La Mole and the French envoy hurried away amidst curses upon all false Frenchmen.  Elizabeth, in a panic, smiled upon Spaniards again, and, for a time, the project of a French consort for her slept.

But not for long.  Alencon had no part in the massacre, and was known to favour Huguenots.  He wrote a fervent love-letter to Elizabeth, and proposed to escape to England; whilst his agent Maisonfleur joined with Mauvissiere, the official French ambassador, in wooing Elizabeth anew for Alencon and for France.  Gradually the parties drew together again, for Catherine was already alarmed at the effect of St. Bartholomew.  All the Protestant world was arming, the English ports were full of privateers to attack Catholic shipping, and aid in plenty was being sent from England to the Huguenots of Rochelle and the rebel Dutchmen.