The stars seemed to favour the Spanish plan. Young Alençon died in June, 1584, and the next heir to the Crown of France was the Huguenot Henry of Navarre. Guise, with his high hopes and the people of Paris at his bidding, was thenceforward more easily brought into obedience to Philip; for upon Spanish forces alone could he depend to aid the French Catholics to resist the accession of a Protestant sovereign. Civil war, indeed, loomed up in France, and from it the Duke of Guise might hope to emerge a king; and in December, 1584, the Catholic league of Philip and Guise was signed at Joinville, by which the King of Spain was left a free hand in English affairs in return for his support of Guise in the rapidly approaching struggle in France. Philip was thus assured, first, that the Huguenots would be too busy to help Elizabeth in her hour of need, and, secondly, that Guise would be too full of his own ambitions in France to interfere with his in England. The death of Gregory XIII. and the accession of Felice Peretti as Pope Sixtus V. also seemed to favour the Spanish objects. Sixtus was full of vast projects for the spread of orthodox Christianity; he was a man of great ability and boundless ambition, who had waited long for his chance and was determined to make the most of it now it had come, so that Olivares had in future a more ready listener than before to his exhortations on behalf of the Catholic King. But though Sixtus yearned to do great things for the Church, he was determined, as his predecessor had been, not to work for purely Spanish aims to the prejudice of France; and for the next two years a keen war of wits was waged between Olivares and the Pope, the Spaniard seeking to obtain the million ducats subsidy to the English enterprise without pledging his master to any definite course in England after the conquest.