The levies for the Milanese expedition were waiting until Marshal de Lesdiguieres could confer personally with the Duke of Savoy.  The reports as to the fidelity of that potentate were not to be believed.  He was trifling with the Spanish ambassadors, so Henry was convinced, who were offering him 300,000 crowns a year besides Piombino, Monaco, and two places in the Milanese, if he would break his treaty with France.  But he was thought to be only waiting until they should be gone before making his arrangements with Lesdiguieres.  “He knows that he can put no trust in Spain, and that he can confide in me,” said the King.  “I have made a great stroke by thus entangling the King of Spain by the use of a few troops in Italy.  But I assure you that there is none but me and My Lords the States that can do anything solid.  Whether the Duke breaks or holds fast will make no difference in our first and great designs.  For the honour of God I beg them to lose no more time, but to trust in me.  I will never deceive them, never abandon them.”

At last 25,000 infantry and 5000 cavalry were already in marching order, and indeed had begun to move towards the Luxemburg frontier, ready to co-operate with the States’ army and that of the possessory princes for the campaign of the Meuse and Rhine.

Twelve thousand more French troops under Lesdiguieres were to act with the Duke of Savoy, and an army as large was to assemble in the Pyrenees and to operate on the Spanish frontier, in hope of exciting and fomenting an insurrection caused by the expulsion of the Moors.  That gigantic act of madness by which Spain thought good at this juncture to tear herself to pieces, driving hundreds of thousands of the most industrious, most intelligent, and most opulent of her population into hopeless exile, had now been accomplished, and was to stand prominent for ever on the records of human fatuity.

Twenty-five thousand Moorish families had arrived at Bayonne, and the Viceroy of Canada had been consulted as to the possibility and expediency of establishing them in that province, although emigration thither seemed less tempting to them than to Virginia.  Certainly it was not unreasonable for Henry to suppose that a kingdom thus torn by internal convulsions might be more open to a well organized attack, than capable of carrying out at that moment fresh projects of universal dominion.

As before observed, Sully was by no means in favour of this combined series of movements, although at a later day, when dictating his famous memoirs to his secretaries, he seems to describe himself as enthusiastically applauding and almost originating them.  But there is no doubt at all that throughout this eventful spring he did his best to concentrate the whole attack on Luxemburg and the Meuse districts, and wished that the movements in the Milanese and in Provence should be considered merely a slight accessory, as not much more than a diversion to the chief design, while Villeroy