The day after the elevation of Burghley to the Treasurership, the Queen started on one of the stately progresses which caused so much delight and enthusiasm to all her subjects but those who had to entertain her, except perhaps Burghley and his rival Leicester, who were both honoured during this summer with a visit from the sovereign. Burghley’s entry of the great event comes curtly enough in his diary after the memorandum of his new appointment, thus:— “1572. July 15. Lord Burghley made Lord Treasurer of England.” “July 22. The Queen’s Majesty at Theobalds.”[354] Elizabeth had visited Theobalds in 1564 and 1571. On this occasion her stay extended over three days, and the domestic biographer of Burghley thus refers to this amongst other visits: “His Lordship’s extraordinary chardg in enterteynment of the Quene was greater to him than to anie of her subjects, for he enterteyned her at his house twelve several tymes, which cost him two or three thousand pounds each tyme.… But his love for his Sovereign, and joy to enterteyn her and her traine, was so greate, as he thought no troble, care, nor cost too much, and all too little.” Whilst Elizabeth slowly made her way from one great house to another, by Gorhambury,[355] Dunstable, Woburn,[356] and so to Kenilworth, the correspondence on the negotiations for the Alençon match became warmer and warmer. Agents and messengers speeded backwards and forwards with portraits and amiable trifles, particularly from the side of England. There was a good reason for this. Before even the treaty of alliance was signed, Burghley had deplored that Charles IX. and his mother were cooling in the agreement for France and England jointly to aid the Flemish rebels. The Pope and the Emperor were trying their hardest to withdraw Charles and his mother from the compromise into which he had entered with Elizabeth; and already the young King and Catharine de Medici were discovering that Coligny and the Huguenots, when they had the upper hand, could be as domineering and tyrannical as the Guises themselves. Paris was in seething discontent that the beloved Guises were in disgrace, and Charles found his throne tottering. To add to his fears from the Catholics, the Huguenot force that had entered Flanders under Genlis had been routed and destroyed by the Spaniards (19th July), and it was clear to Catharine and her son, that if they did not promptly cut themselves free from Elizabeth’s attack on Spanish interests, they would be dragged down when the Huguenots fell. The very day that the news of Genlis’ defeat arrived in Paris, a young noble named La Mole was sent flying to England, ostensibly to confer with the Queen on the Alençon match. There was no particular reason for roughly breaking off that, and so offending Elizabeth; but the sending of a mere schoolboy like La Mole with only vague instructions about the proposed joint action in Flanders would show that Charles IX. did not intend to take any further