and that no one else deserved the title of Most Christian.  He sent his secretary Cayas to me with his felicitations upon the event, and with the information that he was just going to Saint Jerome to render thanks to God, and to offer his prayers 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 subjects.  In this cold-blooded way, too, did his Catholic Majesty order the execution of some thousand Huguenots additionally, in order more fully to carry out his royal brother’s plans; yet Philip could write of himself, “that all the world recognized the gentleness of his nature and the mildness of his intentions.”