Oudenarde fell early in July, and Alençon immediately afterwards sent an ultimatum to Elizabeth. He was at the end of his resources. If she did not at once send him the money she had promised he must abandon his task, and Spain would crush Flanders for good and for all under the heel of Alexander Farnese. The time had gone by for high-strained compliments and billing and cooing, and Alençon, in his letter to the Queen, says his mind is too full of war to talk about marriage, and he must leave Antwerp and await her answer elsewhere. Leicester and his friends feared he might go to Flushing, and thence run over to England, and were consequently anxious to send him £20,000 at once. Cecil was strongly opposed to this, as at the end of July there was in the Exchequer less than £80,000, which, with the £400,000 in gold in the Tower, formed the whole of the national treasury. Whilst this was being discussed there came news of the discovery of the Salcedo plot, said to have been prompted by Spain, the Pope, and the Guises, to assassinate Alençon and the Prince of Orange. The avowals made by Salcedo on the rack satisfied even Henry III. that a vast Catholic conspiracy was in progress, from which he was excluded, and this once more drew him nearer to Elizabeth, and he instructed his ambassador to assure her that he would accede to the conditions she demanded as soon as she had decided upon the marriage. Her answer was that since the King consented to defray the cost of the war she must have it under his own hand, with an undertaking that England under no circumstances should be called upon to contribute anything in case of a war with Spain. The King’s readiness to accede to every demand of Elizabeth was of itself a source of suspicion to her, and was by many attributed to a deep Papist plot to throw the whole responsibility for breaking off the marriage upon her, and so turn Alençon against her. To a certain extent it had this effect, for although Alençon’s letters to the Queen herself were a mixture of erotics and reproaches, his communications to Sussex were in a different tone. The Queen, he said, was the cause of his ruin, and if she will not at once come to his aid or marry him he must join her enemies, and she will have no cause to complain. Lierre had just been captured by the Spaniards, and all Alençon’s prayers for money were ineffectual. A new turn of the screw was applied to the King of France by Elizabeth nearly every day. The last demand was that he was to defend her not against Spain alone, but against all her enemies whatsoever, and that an undertaking to this effect, stamped with the great seal of France, was to be sent her--anything indeed, to drag France into open enmity with Spain before she showed her hand. Events seemed to be working for her. Henry III. was already jealous of the Guises, his mother’s fleet to aid the Portuguese pretender at Terceira against Philip had been destroyed, and Catharine was vowing vengeance,