for seven years longer.  Alva was, to be sure, much encouraged at first by the language of the French princes and nobles who were present at Bayonne.  Monluc protested that “they might saw the Queen Dowager in two before she would become Huguenot.”  Montpensier exclaimed that “he would be cut in pieces for Philip’s service—­that the Spanish monarch was the only hope for France,” and, embracing Alva with fervor, he affirmed that “if his body were to be opened at that moment, the name of Philip would be found imprinted upon his heart.”  The Duke, having no power to proceed to an autopsy, physical or moral, of Montpensier’s interior, was left somewhat in the dark, notwithstanding these ejaculations.  His first conversation with the youthful King, however, soon dispelled his hopes.  He found immediately, in his own words, that Charles the Ninth “had been doctored.”  To take up arms, for religious reasons, against his own subjects, the monarch declared to be ruinous and improper.  It was obvious to Alva that the royal pupil had learned his lesson for that occasion.  It was a pity for humanity that the wisdom thus hypocritically taught him could not have sunk into his heart.  The Duke did his best to bring forward the plans and wishes of his royal master, but without success.  The Queen Regent proposed a league of the two Kings and the Emperor against the Turk, and wished to arrange various matrimonial alliances between the sons and daughters of the three houses.  Alva expressed the opinion that the alliances were already close enough, while, on the contrary, a secret league against the Protestants would make all three families the safer.  Catherine, however, was not to be turned from her position.  She refused even to admit that the Chancellor de l’Hospital was a Huguenot, to which the Duke replied that she was the only person in her kingdom who held that opinion.  She expressed an intention of convoking an assembly of doctors, and Alva ridiculed in his letters to Philip the affectation of such a proceeding.  In short, she made it sufficiently evident that the hour for the united action of the French and Spanish sovereigns against their subjects had not struck, so that the famous Bayonne conference was terminated without a result.  It seemed not the less certain, however, in the general opinion of mankind, that all the particulars of a regular plot had been definitely arranged upon this occasion, for the extermination of the Protestants, and the error has been propagated by historians of great celebrity of all parties, down to our own days.  The secret letters of Alva, however, leave no doubt as to the facts.