A week after the date of the letter just quoted, Guzman saw the Queen, when, as usual, she turned the conversation to the subject of marriages, and the ambassador slily hinted that there was some talk of her marrying the French king. She held down her head and giggled at this, and Guzman continued that the French ambassador had asked his opinion about the match, seeing that the King was so little and she so tall. “O!” said the Queen, “they tell me he is not very short; but as it is Lent, and you are my friend, I will make a confession to you. A proposal for marriage was formerly made to me by the King, my brother-in-law (Philip). The King of France has now made me an offer, as well as the Kings of Denmark and Sweden, and, I am told, the Archduke Charles also. The only person who has not been suggested is your prince (Don Carlos).” Guzman replied that the reason no doubt was that, as she had refused the King himself, it was concluded that she had no desire to marry, since no higher match could be proposed to her. She retorted that she did not consider such an inference clear: it is true that she had no desire to marry, and would not do so if she could appoint a satisfactory successor; but her people were pressing her, and she was now forced either to marry or nominate an heir, which would be difficult. “The world thinks that a woman cannot live unmarried, and, if she refrains from marriage, that she does so for some bad reason; as they said of me that I avoided doing so because I was fond of the Earl of Leicester, whom I could not marry, as he had a wife living. His wife is now dead, but yet I do not marry him, although I have been pressed to do so even by your King.”[38] Elizabeth was getting very uneasy about the Franco-Spanish meeting at Bayonne and the rumoured voyage of Philip to the Netherlands with a strong force to crush Protestantism for good and for all; the idea of her marriage with Charles IX. was one eminently calculated to breed distrust of the French in the mind of Philip, and, as such, was being actively forwarded by the Huguenot party. When therefore de Foix, the French ambassador, saw her a few days afterwards she told him that she had refused to let Cecil put into writing his objections to the match, as promised, because the objections were really all reducible to one--namely, the question of disparity of age. She said that Smith had written lately, saying that the King had grown wonderfully, and that, when he had seen him after an interval of a few weeks, he hardly recognised him, as he had grown so tall, and he would no doubt be as tall as his father had been. De Foix afterwards sat next to the Queen at supper, when she was in very high spirits, and drank the King’s health, and during the entertainment which followed talked of nothing but the attractions of the French Court.[39]