No sooner had Louis XIV. taken the management of affairs into his own hands, than he began to let foreign countries understand that France was now ruled by a sovereign who intended his will to be law, and was not likely to abate one jot of the dignity which he thought due to his crown. In the autumn of 1661, on the occasion of the solemn entry of a Swedish envoy into London, the ambassadors of France and Spain in their eagerness to gain precedence of each other came to blows in the narrow streets. The carriage of d’Estrades, the French ambassador, was overturned, his horse killed, and his suite forced to take refuge in the adjacent houses wounded and beaten; while the victorious Spaniard proudly took his place in the procession clothed with all the insolent dignity of success. Louis took the matter up fiercely, dismissed d’Estrades for having been beaten, recalled his own ambassador from Madrid, and demanded and actually obtained from Philip IV., under threat of war, the acknowledgment of the right of the crown of France to precede that of Spain. [Sidenote: =Humiliation of the Pope by Louis, 1662.=] A few months later a tumult of a less honourable character brought Louis into sharp antagonism to the Pope. The French ambassador at Rome, the duc de Créqui, had made himself very unpopular by his intolerable pride, and some of the Corsican guards of the Vatican, urged on it is said by the brother of the Pope, and smarting under the wrong of a personal insult rendered to their body by some of the French suite, made themselves the organs of the general hatred and of private revenge, by a gross attack upon the ambassador’s wife as she was returning to her palace. A page was killed, many of the servants wounded, and the duc de Créqui, leaving Rome in real or assumed fear for his own life, demanded from Alexander VII. a reparation which the Pope seemed very unwilling to give. Louis immediately seized Avignon, assembled an army, appointed the maréchal du Plessis-Praslin to the command, and ordered him to form the siege of Rome and force the Pope to do justice to the outraged majesty of France. Alexander was astonished at this unexpected display of energy, and sent his nephew the cardinal Chigi in all haste to Paris to offer an humble apology and obtain the best terms he could. He was the first legate say the French historians ever sent by a Pope to ask for pardon. If so, the success of the experiment hardly warranted its repetition. Louis remained for some time obstinately irate, and was only pacified by imposing upon the Pope the public humiliation of banishing his brother, disbanding his Corsican guard, and erecting a pyramid in Rome as a perpetual memorial of his disgrace. [Sidenote: =Purchase of Dunkirk, 1662.=]