Flemish merchants were doubly alarmed at the state of things, for England, too, threatened reprisal by removing the cloth market from Antwerp to Embden and imposing tonnage duties on merchant ships of Flanders driven by stress of weather into English ports for safety during storm.[953] But the government in Flanders was obdurate. Granvella declared England’s threat to remove the staple to Embden to be “puerile rhodomontade.” He believed that not only would the prohibition against the import of English cloth compel Elizabeth to redress the grievances of Spanish subjects against England, but that it might even make the English government more lenient toward the Catholic religion. Furthermore, he argued, the tax would operate like a protective tariff to stimulate the manufacture of cloth in the Low Countries. “If not a single bolt of English cloth ever comes into Flanders again,” he wrote “it will be to the permanent profit of the Pays-Bas. We saw this clearly last year during the plague when the prohibition having temporarily suspended the importation of this kind of goods, there was manufactured in the single county of Flanders 60,000 pieces of cloth, or more than the sum total of the three preceding years.”[954] In the case of French wines the Flemish government even established a maximum law for their sale which cut the throat of French merchants worse than ever.[955] The French government carried the action of the Flemish government up to Madrid, where for months the duty on wine and the buttresses of Gravelines were matters of repeated interviews between St. Sulpice and the King, and were still unsettled questions at the time of the conference at Bayonne.[956] Meanwhile the conflict of the Flemish reform party became more acute because it became complicated with the question of religion.