On Ash Wednesday, 1565, Elizabeth listened to an open-air sermon preached by Dr. Nowell, Dean of Saint Paul’s, an ardent Reformer, who probably was not a politician. In the course of his sermon he condemned the veneration of images, and Elizabeth angrily told him not to talk upon that subject. Nowell either did not hear her or did not choose to regard the rebuke, and continued, when the Queen again raised her voice and peremptorily commanded him to pass to another subject, as that one was worn out. Soon afterwards de Foix, in conversation with Guzman, remarked that the Queen might have avoided so public and marked an interruption of the preacher. The Spaniard was of another opinion. “I think quite differently,” he said. “Those who sin publicly must be publicly rebuked; and as this Queen does, so might your most Christian King do it: when he gets older he will, I fear, be likely to make more account of the heretics.” The much feared interview of Bayonne, which the warlike party in Spain hoped would result in the crushing of Protestantism and the eventual submission of England to Spanish dictation, took place in these not very encouraging circumstances in May, 1565. Elizabeth, as a diversion, had been for months negotiating with Catharine for a French marriage, and the Queen Regent of France was taken aback when she saw at Bayonne the articles which she was expected to sign. The total extermination of Protestantism in France and the world over would have meant her personal political extinction, and probably that of her son’s realm; for Philip in that case would have been paramount. What she wanted was not this, but to be able to play the Guises off against the Bourbons, and keep Elizabeth always as a potential ally when the Catholics grew too strong to suit her. At Bayonne, therefore, whilst she ostensibly acceded to everything dictated by Alba and Lorraine, and led her devoutly Catholic and hispanolised daughter to believe that France with all its national power would support her husband’s objects, Catharine no sooner turned her face towards Paris than she began to introduce all sorts of conditions and limitations which stultified the whole plan of the Catholic League, whilst she became more warmly interested than ever in the talk of Elizabeth’s marriage with one of her sons.