In the course of the summer, Magaret wrote to her brother that the popular frenzy was becoming more and more intense.  The people were crying aloud, she said, that the Spanish inquisition, or a worse than Spanish inquisition, had been established among them by means of bishops and ecclesiastics.  She urged Philip to cause the instructions for the inquisitors to be revised.  Egmont, she said, was vehement in expressing his dissatisfaction at the discrepancy between Philip’s language to him by word of mouth and that of the royal despatches on the religious question.  The other seigniors were even more indignant.

While the popular commotion in the Netherlands was thus fearfully increasing, another circumstance came to add to the prevailing discontent.  The celebrated interview between Catharine de Medici and her daughter, the Queen of Spain, occurred in the middle of the month of June, at Bayonne.  The darkest suspicions as to the results to humanity of the plots to be engendered in this famous conference between the representatives of France and Spain were universally entertained.  These suspicions were most reasonable, but they were nevertheless mistaken.  The plan for a concerted action to exterminate the heretics in both kingdoms had, as it was perfectly well known, been formed long before this epoch.  It was also no secret that the Queen Regent of France had been desirous of meeting her son-in-law in order to confer with him upon important matters, face to face.  Philip, however, had latterly been disinclined for the personal interview with Catharine.  As his wife was most anxious to meet her mother, it was nevertheless finally arranged that Queen Isabella should make the journey; but he excused himself, on account of the multiplicity of his affairs, from accompanying her in the expedition.  The Duke of Alva was, accordingly, appointed to attend the Queen to Bayonne.  Both were secretly instructed by Philip to leave nothing undone in the approaching interview toward obtaining the hearty co-operation of Catharine de Medici in a general and formally-arranged scheme for the simultaneous extermination of all heretics in the French and Spanish dominions.  Alva’s conduct in this diplomatic commission was stealthy in the extreme.  His letters reveal a subtlety of contrivance and delicacy of handling such as the world has not generally reckoned among his characteristics.  All his adroitness, as well as the tact of Queen Isabella, by whose ability Alva declared himself to have been astounded, proved quite powerless before the steady fencing of the wily Catharine.  The Queen Regent, whose skill the Duke, even while defeated, acknowledged to his master, continued firm in her design to maintain her own power by holding the balance between Guise and Montmorency, between Leaguer and Huguenot.  So long as her enemies could be employed in exterminating each other, she was willing to defer the extermination of the Huguenots.  The great massacre of St.