With the closing of the Council of Trent, the representatives of the ultra-Catholic powers, notably Spain and Savoy, intimated to Charles IX that their sovereigns would assist him in the extirpation of heresy in France. The offer was both a promise and a menace, the implication being that the Catholic world at large would not tolerate the recognition of Protestantism accorded by France and that a joint action of the powers most concerned might compel the king of France to live up to his title of Most Christian King. The cardinal of Lorraine had carried the idea of the Triumvirate to Trent with him,[753] and on the floor of the Council had proposed the formation of an association to be called “The Brotherhood of Catholics in France.” He offered to secure the co-operation of his nephews, relatives, and friends, and returned to France with the consent of the Pope for that purpose.[754] The Triumvirate, as we have seen, had already made overtures to Spain, to which Philip II had responded with cordial, if no very definite sentiments, and from the time of the promulgation of the Edict of January and the formation of the Triumvirate, the idea of a Catholic league in which the Pope and the king of Spain were to be the chief pillars, begins to take shape.[755] The mission of Louis de St. Gelais, sieur de Lansac, to Trent and Rome in this month, was partly to prevent the formation of such a league, and partly to persuade the Pope to approve the French government’s appropriation of the property of the church. Granvella was not unfavorable to the idea, though in his eyes such a league should be formed, not for the purpose of intervening in France, but as a defensive measure, lest Catherine endeavor to profit by the critical situation prevailing in the Spanish Netherlands and interfere there in order to divert the discontent of the French from home affairs, and to prevent the Protestants of the Netherlands from assisting their coreligionists in France.[756]