The King was edified by his zeal.  An enterprise of such spiritual and temporal promise was not to be slighted, and Menendez was empowered to conquer and convert Florida at his own cost.  The conquest was to be effected within three years.  Menendez was to take with him five hundred men, and supply them with five hundred slaves, besides horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs.  Villages were to be built, with forts to defend them; and sixteen ecclesiastics, of whom four should be Jesuits, were to form the nucleus of a Floridian church.  The King, on his part, granted Menendez free trade with Hispaniola, Porto Rico, Cuba, and Spain, the office of Adelantado of Florida for life, joined to the right of naming his successor, and large emoluments to be drawn from the expected conquest.

The compact struck, Menendez hastened to his native Asturias to raise money among his relatives.  Scarcely was he gone, when tidings for the first time reached Madrid that Florida was already occupied by a colony of French Protestants, and that a reinforcement, under Ribaut, was on the point of sailing thither.  A French historian of high authority declares that these advices came from the Catholic party at the French court, in whom all sense of the national interest and honor was smothered under their hatred of Coligny and the Huguenots.  Of this there can be little doubt, though information also came from the buccaneer Frenchmen captured in the West Indies.

Foreigners had invaded the territory of Spain.  The trespassers, too, were heretics, foes of God and liegemen of the Devil.  Their doom was fixed.  But how would France endure an assault, in time of peace, on subjects who had gone forth on an enterprise sanctioned by the crown, undertaken in its name, and under its commission?

The throne of France, where the corruption of the nation seemed gathered to a head, was trembling between the two parties of the Catholics and the Huguenots, whose chiefs aimed at royalty.  Flattering both, caressing both, betraying both, playing one against the other, Catherine de Medicis, by a thousand crafty arts and expedients of the moment, sought to retain the crown on the heads of her weak and vicious sons.  Of late her crooked policy had drawn her towards the Catholic party, in other words, the party of Spain; and already she had given ear to the savage Duke of Alva, urging her to the course which, seven years later, led to the carnage of St. Bartholomew.  In short, the Spanish policy was ascendant, and no thought of the national interest or honor could restrain that basest of courts from consigning by hundreds to the national enemy those whom, itself, it was meditating to immolate by thousands.