But, indeed, the French King was not so well informed as he imagined himself to be of the authorship of these troubles.  Mucio, upon whose head he thus threatened vengeance, was but the instrument.  The concealed hand that was directing all these odious intrigues, and lighting these flames of civil war which were so long to make France a scene of desolation, was that of the industrious letter-writer in the Escorial.  That which Henry of Navarre shrewdly suspected, when he talked of the Spanish dollars in the Balafre’s pocket, that which was dimly visible to the Bishop of Acqs when he told Henry iii. that the “Tagus had emptied itself into the Seine and Loire, and that the gold of Mexico was flowing into the royal cabinet,” was much more certain than they supposed.

Philip, in truth, was neglecting his own most pressing interests that he might direct all his energies towards entertaining civil war in France.  That France should remain internally at peace was contrary to all his plans.  He had therefore long kept Guise and his brother, the Cardinal de Lorraine, in his pay, and he had been spending large sums of money to bribe many of the most considerable functionaries in the kingdom.

The most important enterprises in the Netherlands were allowed to languish, that these subterranean operations of the “prudent” monarch of Spain should be pushed forward.  The most brilliant and original genius that Philip had the good fortune to have at his disposal, the genius of Alexander Farnese, was cramped and irritated almost to madness, by the fetters imposed upon it, by the sluggish yet obstinate nature of him it was bound to obey.  Farnese was at that moment engaged in a most arduous military undertaking, that famous siege of Antwerp, the details of which will be related in future chapters, yet he was never furnished with men or money enough to ensure success to a much more ordinary operation.  His complaints, subdued but intense, fell almost unheeded on his master’s ear.  He had not “ten dollars at his command,” his cavalry horses were all dead of hunger or had been eaten by their riders, who were starving to death themselves, his army had dwindled to a “handful,” yet he still held on to his purpose, in spite of famine, the desperate efforts of indefatigable enemies, and all the perils and privations of a deadly winter.  He, too, was kept for a long time in profound ignorance of Philip’s designs.

Meantime, while the Spanish soldiers were starving in Flanders, Philip’s dollars were employed by Mucio and his adherents in enlisting troops in Switzerland and Germany, in order to carry on the civil war in France.  The French king was held systematically up to ridicule or detestation in every village-pulpit in his own kingdom, while the sister of Mucio, the Duchess of Montpensier, carried the scissors at her girdle, with which she threatened to provide Henry with a third crown, in addition to those of France and Poland, which he had disgraced—­the coronal tonsure of a monk.  The convent should be, it was intimated, the eventual fate of the modern Childeric, but meantime it was more important than ever to supersede the ultimate pretensions of Henry of Navarre.  To prevent that heretic of heretics, who was not to be bought with Spanish gold, from ever reigning, was the first object of Philip and Mucio.