Walsingham’s correspondence reflects minutely the state of feeling among the Huguenots at this moment. “Such of the religion as before slept in security,” he writes to Burghley on the 26th July, “begin now to awake and to see their danger, and do therefore conclude, that unless this enterprise in the Low Countries have good success, their cause groweth desperate. They have therefore of late sent to the king, who is absent from home, to show him that if the Prince of Orange quail, it shall not lie in him [Charles] to maintain him in his protection by virtue of his edict; they desire him, therefore, out of hand, to resolve upon something that may be of assistance, offering themselves to employ therein their lives, lands, and goods.” Writing the same day to the Earl of Leicester, the embassador says: “Those of the religion have made demonstration to the king that his [Orange’s] enterprise lacking good success, it shall not then lie in his power to maintain his edict;” apparently meaning, that if the Flemish rebels were subdued, Spain would again be so formidable that it would be dangerous to tolerate the Huguenots in defiance of Philip II. Walsingham then adds that the Reformed party “desire him to weigh well, whether it were better to have foreign war with advantage, or inward war to the ruin of himself and his estate.” This was one of those unfortunate passages which Catherine afterward employed with so much effect to terrify Charles into the August massacre. The meaning of the words is plain enough, but an unscrupulous advocate would easily convert them into a threat of rebellion against the king’s authority. As soon as the French had recovered from the first shock caused by the news of Genlis’s defeat, they began to vapor and talk of revenge; and their hostile feelings were still farther exasperated by the report of certain contemptuous expressions ascribed to Alva. Every thing betokened an approaching rupture between France and Spain, and ere long the rumors of war became so loud that the Venetian Senate hastily dispatched an embassador with authority to mediate between the angry governments.[535] Michieli writes in July to his superiors of volunteer expeditions of horse and foot setting off daily: “For four or five days war was regarded in Paris as declared; it was openly talked of.”[536] On the 23d July, Petrucci, the Tuscan embassador, writes to his ducal master, that the royal council have been in deliberation about the ransom of the prisoners, but “does not know how the king [Charles] can grant this, without giving the greatest suspicion to the Catholic king; and yet he shows great interest in the matter.”[537] Elizabeth had done her part in the anti-Spanish movement by sending troops to Flushing. Sir T. Smith wrote to inform Walsingham that Sir Humphrey Gilbert had been “sent over with his band of Englishmen and some Frenchmen, who have taken Sluys and besieged the castle.”[538]