Charles, whose dislike toward “those of the religion” needed no stimulus, occasionally indulged in bursts of irritation which he was too young to repress. One day when the admiral remonstrated with him on the restrictions put upon the last edict, he replied: “Not long ago you were satisfied to be tolerated by the Catholics, now you want to be their equals; in a short time, I suppose you will desire to be alone and to drive us from the kingdom.” Coligny made no reply, as indeed no reply would have satisfied the angry boy, who burst into his mother’s apartments, and added, after telling her what had passed: “The Duke of Alva was right: such heads are too tall in a state. We must put them down by force.”[380] Catherine appears at this time to have been exceedingly ill-disposed toward Coligny. Writing to her daughter Isabella, she says: “Although the admiral remains at court, he will be as one dead;[381] because, with God’s help, I shall not suffer myself to be governed by either party, for I know they all love God, the king, and your mother less than their own advantage and ambition; and as they know full well that I will not permit the king or the kingdom to be ruined by them, they love me in words only.” It was about this time also that several German princes, including the Palatine of the Rhine and the Dukes of Saxony and Wurtemberg, dispatched an embassy to Charles, interceding in behalf of their French co-religionists. With expressions of great attachment, they prayed him to observe the Edict of Pacification; to permit the ministers to preach as well at Paris as elsewhere, and to allow the people to listen to them in any number. He answered them sharply that he could be friends with his cousins of Germany only so long as they abstained from meddling in the domestic affairs of his kingdom. After a pause he continued in a still more angry tone: “I might also pray them to permit the Catholics to worship freely in their own cities.” It was an apt retort, for so far as concerned public worship the Romanists in many parts of Protestant Germany and Switzerland were very little, if at all, better off than the Huguenots of France.