first time reached Madrid that Florida was already occupied by a colony
of French Protestants, and that a reinforcement, under Ribaut, was on
the point of sailing thither. A French historian of high authority
declares that these advices came from the Catholic party at the French
court, in whom all sense of the national interest and honor was
smothered under their hatred of Coligny and the Huguenots. Of this there
can be little doubt, though information also came from the buccaneer
Frenchmen captured in the West Indies.

Foreigners had invaded the territory of Spain. The trespassers, too,
were heretics, foes of God and liegemen of the Devil. Their doom was
fixed. But how would France endure an assault, in time of peace, on
subjects who had gone forth on an enterprise sanctioned by the crown,
undertaken in its name, and under its commission?

The throne of France, where the corruption of the nation seemed gathered
to a head, was trembling between the two parties of the Catholics and
the Huguenots, whose chiefs aimed at royalty. Flattering both, caressing
both, betraying both, playing one against the other, Catherine de
Médicis, by a thousand crafty arts and expedients of the moment, sought
to retain the crown on the heads of her weak and vicious sons. Of late
her crooked policy had drawn her towards the Catholic party, in other
words, the party of Spain; and already she had given ear to the savage
Duke of Alva, urging her to the course which, seven years later, led to
the carnage of St. Bartholomew. In short, the Spanish policy was
ascendant, and no thought of the national interest or honor could
restrain that basest of courts from consigning by hundreds to the
national enemy those whom, itself, it was meditating to immolate by
thousands.