All this new-born delight in Spaniards on the part of Elizabeth and her courtiers was, of course, not without its reason. The fact is that, after all her aid to Condé and his Huguenots, peace had been made in France upon terms which gave predominance to the Catholics; and she considered that Condé had betrayed her in this, as, indeed, he had. Cardinal Lorraine, the bitter enemy of Elizabeth, was now Catharine de Medici’s henchman, and was busy negotiating a renewal of the Catholic League, which boded ill for England and Protestantism if it succeeded. A meeting was to take place between Catharine and her daughter, Elizabeth, Philip’s wife, with Alba and Lorraine in the background, to settle an accord between France and Spain for the utter extermination of Protestantism throughout the world; and even the Bourbon Huguenot princes of France had been temporarily silenced. In the circumstances Elizabeth naturally wooed Spain violently, and before Guzman had been in England a week he found himself in the centre of a real or feigned conspiracy of the unprincipled Dudley, to introduce Catholicism into England under Spanish protection, and depose Elizabeth’s Protestant minister, Cecil. On the pretext that Cecil had helped in the production of a book by John Hales in favour of Catharine Grey’s claim to the succession, Dudley’s friends secretly urged Guzman to recommend Elizabeth to dismiss and punish Cecil, “as if he were out of the way, the affairs of your Majesty would be more favourably dealt with, and religious questions as well, because Cecil and his friends are those who persecute the Catholics and dislike your Majesty, whereas the other man is regarded as faithful, and the rest of the Catholics so consider him, and have adopted him as their instrument.”