In order still more to avert the Catholic alliance, Elizabeth sent
active help to the French Huguenots, and drew closer to the Protestants
of Germany and Holland, where distrust of their Spanish sovereign was
already brewing. In these circumstances, Elizabeth for the first time
could defy Spain, and Quadra, accused of conspiring against the queen,
was expelled the country. When the Darnley match for Mary Stuart looked
too serious, Elizabeth diverted it for a time by proposing that
Dudley--now Earl of Leicester--should marry Mary. It was, of course, but
a trick, through which the Scottish queen saw, with the object of
preventing the Darnley marriage and discrediting Mary in the eyes of
foreign princes; but it served its turn for a time.

In July 1564, when the league of France and Spain again menaced her,
Elizabeth set her cap at the boy Don Carlos, and even swore to the
Spanish ambassador that she was really a Catholic.

The further to alienate the Catholic powers from each other, she
simultaneously approached the emperor to revive the proposal of marriage
with the Archduke Charles, and to Catherine de Medici to drop a hint
that she--Elizabeth--might marry the young King of France, Charles IX.,
a youth barely half her age--anything to prevent a combination against
her and the marriage of Don Carlos with Mary Stuart. Catherine de Medici
had her own reasons at the time for smiling upon Elizabeth's suggestion.
She did not wish to be bound too tightly to Spain and the Catholics, for
fear of the Huguenots; and in February 1565, she wrote to Elizabeth,
saying that she would be the happiest of mothers if she could see her
dearly beloved sister of England married to her son, Charles IX.

Elizabeth was full of maidenly hesitation. She was too old for him;
perhaps he would not think her beautiful, and so on; but she took care