As had been expected, the proposal of Salcede was listened to with much pleasure by the duke of Anjou, who treated him as a valuable friend. The duke was as yet ignorant that the conspirator had been reconciled to the Guises. Nor was he aware that, in his way to Bruges, Salcede had visited the enemy’s camp, had a conference with the prince of Parma, the viceroy, and been accompanied to Bruges by two of the prince’s agents. But the sharp-sighted prince of Orange was not disposed to grant his confidence to the newcomer so readily as the duke; he disliked and suspected him, both as being in his origin a Spaniard, and as having been found guilty of an infamous offence. The enquiries of the prince of Orange elicited sufficient evidence to justify his suspicion that Salcede had sinister designs, and he, therefore, advised the duke to arrest him. This advice was followed by Anjou, who had already learned, from another quarter, that his pretended partisan was connected with the Guises. Salcede was accordingly arrested on his coming to the palace. The two agents of the prince of Parma were waiting at the palace gate for their confederate’s return; one of them escaped, the other, Francis Baza by name, was seized and committed to prison. In the course of a few days, Baza put an end to his existence. In the first examination, mysterious hints were all that could be drawn from Salcede; in the second, he spontaneously disclosed so complicated and gigantic a conspiracy, that his hearers were astounded. That part of it which related to Belgium and the duke of Anjou was the smallest part; a mere episode in the Guisian Iliad. The conspirators purposed nothing less than to imprison the king of France, exterminate the royal family, and subject the kingdom to the domination of Spain. Their means Salcede stated to be immense. As implicated in the plot, he named a multitude of the most powerful nobles, a majority of the governors of provinces and towns, and even some of the king’s ministers and favourites. The provinces of Picardy, Champagne, Burgundy, Britanny, and the Cotentin, were, he said, secured by the plotters; nor would foreign aid be wanting, as the papal and Piedmontese troops were to enter France on the side of Lyons, while two Spanish armies were to pass the Pyrenees into Bearn and Gascony, where the malecontents were in readiness to receive them. This deposition, after a lapse of some days, he voluntarily repeated and enlarged, and he offered to prove it, by being confronted with three persons, whom he had before mentioned, and who, he was convinced, would confess that he had spoken but the truth.