gallop went the news from Isabel to her mother; how the Catholic party and Spain were plotting to ruin the house of Navarre, and overthrow the equilibrium in France; and Jeanne d’Albret and her son, also warned by Isabel, escaped from Pau into central France. Philip probably never knew that it was his wife who had upset so promising a plan; but that her intervention was not from any love of Protestantism is clearly seen by her subsequent action. Her Catholicism, indeed, was more Spanish than French in its character; and that her politic mother should call to her councils at all those whose orthodoxy was doubtful, appeared to her nothing short of abominable, though for a short time after the first Huguenot war, Catharine had managed to bring about an appearance of harmony between the two great French factions. But Condé, the chief of the Bourbons, after Anthony’s death, was rough and imperious, and personally disliked by Catharine: Cardinal Lorraine returned to France from the Council of Trent early in 1564, thirsting to revenge the murder of his brother Guise, and soon Catholic intrigue was busy in the French Court. Isabel wrote to her mother an extraordinary letter at this time (the summer of 1564), evidently inspired by Philip, and forming a part of the Lorraine intrigues to win Catherine to the ultra-catholic party. ‘If,’ wrote Isabel, ‘you will cause Frenchmen to live as good catholics, there is nothing you can ask of my husband that he will not give you. He begs you will not compromise with the evil people, but punish them very severely. If you are afraid because of their great number ... you may call upon us, and we will give you everything we possess, and troops as well, to support religion. If you do not punish these men yourself, you must not be offended if the King, my husband, listens to the demands of those who crave his help to defend the faith, and gives them what they ask. He is, indeed, obliged to do so, for it touches him more than any one. If France becomes Lutheran, Flanders and Spain will not be far behind.’[189] And so, for page after page of her long letter, Isabel urges her mother to crush the Huguenots for once and for all. Catharine loved intrigue and crooked ways; and, although it was no part of her plan to have only one party in France, she feared the Guises less now that the Duke was dead, and it doubtless seemed to her a good opportunity for drawing closer to Spain, in order to effect the marriage of her daughter Margaret with Don Carlos, and gain some advantage by marriage or otherwise for her darling son Henry (Duke of Orleans).