Thus England freed herself from Spanish tutelage within six months of Elizabeth’s accession. Feria said she “was a daughter of the devil and her chief ministers the greatest scoundrels and heretics in the land,” and when he went back to join his master in Flanders he breathed fire and slaughter against England and the Queen, whose diplomacy had stultified all his efforts. He had done his best to persuade Philip to pluck a quarrel with England that should give him an excuse for armed intervention, the deposition of Elizabeth by the Pope, and the patronage of Catharine Grey as a pretender for Elizabeth’s throne with the aid of the English Catholics, who, he assured Philip, were all in his favour.[143] But Philip thought that he had found a better way than by war and rejected the advice of his fiery councillors. To represent him in England there remained at Elizabeth’s Court the best possible instrument that could have been selected in the circumstances, the Bishop of Aquila, Alvaro de la Quadra, a supple, patient, unscrupulous old ecclesiastic, who had lived long in Italy and was an adept at sly, stealthy diplomacy, which so cleverly used religion as the stalking-horse of politics. Bishop Jewel calls him “a clever, crafty, old fox”; and he needed all his cunning, for his task for the next five years until it broke his heart was to keep Elizabeth, heretic though she might be, from joining either the Protestants or the French against Philip. For even before the ink was dry that ratified the peace of Cateau Cambresis, before the pompous ceremonies in England, France, and Spain that celebrated it were finished, a stroke of Fate had rendered the union between the two great Catholic Powers unstable, and old political traditions were reasserting themselves. I have told elsewhere[144] of the ill-fated feast in Paris, when stern Alba wedded in June, 1559, as proxy for his master, the beautiful Valois Princess of fourteen. How her father, the gallant Henry, was stricken down mortally at the joust that followed, and how the rise of his long-neglected wife, Catharine de Medici, able and ambitious, soon made the Catholic League a hollow pretence. She needed not the dominance of the Guises and their Catholic friends, but so nicely to balance them against the Huguenots that she herself might hold the scale. She did not send her sweet daughter to Spain as a pledge for the extirpation of Protestantism root and branch, as had been intended, but to cajole Philip into helping her personally to hold her own as ruler of France, whichever faction was paramount, and to win, if possible, the heir of Spain for her younger daughter, so that her hold over the country might be perpetuated.