But Elizabeth and the Huguenots had no monopoly of cunning, and whilst the billing and cooing with La Mole went on, the massacre of St. Bartholomew was being secretly planned, and every effort was being made by the French King to draw England into a position of overt hostility to Spain, whilst he remained unpledged. The Ambassador, Fénélon, and young La Mole, left the Queen, and returned to London on the 27th August. On the same day there arrived at Rye two couriers from Paris, one from Walsingham to the Queen and Burghley, the other to the French Ambassador. The French courier was detained, and his papers sent forward with Walsingham’s despatches to the Queen. The news of the great crime of St. Bartholomew fell upon Elizabeth and her court like a death-knell; for it seemed that at last the threatened crusade against Protestantism had begun, and that England was struck at as well as the Huguenots. All rejoicings were stopped, mourning garb was assumed, and the gay devices of masques and mummeries gave way to anxious conferences and plans for defence. Affrighted Protestants by the thousand came flying across the Channel in any craft that would sail; from mouth to mouth in England ran the dreadful story of unprovoked and wanton slaughter, and on every side the old English feeling of hatred and distrust of the false Frenchmen came uppermost again. On the 7th September, La Mothe Fénélon was received by the Queen at Woodstock in dead silence, and surrounded by all the signs of mourning. He made the best of a bad matter: talked of a plot of Coligny and the Huguenots to seize the Louvre, urged that the massacre was unpremeditated, and hoped that the friendship between France and England would continue uninterrupted. But Elizabeth knew that such a friendship could only be a snare for her whilst the Guises were paramount, and she dismissed the Ambassador with a plain indication of her opinion. Two days afterwards Burghley penned a long letter from the Council to Walsingham, dictating the steps to be taken for the protection of English interests; and he accompanied it by a private note, in which the Lord Treasurer’s own view is frankly set forth. “I see,” he says, “the devil is suffered by Almighty God for our sins to be strong in following the persecution of Christ’s members, and therefore we are not only vigilant of our own defence against such trayterous attempts as lately have been put in use there in France, but also to call ourselves to repentance.… The King assures her Majesty that the navy prepared by Strozzi shall not in any way endamage her Majestie; but we have great cause in these times to doubt all fair speeches, and therefore we do presently put all the sea-coasts in defence, and mean to send her Majesty’s navy to sea with speed, and so to continue until we see further whereunto to trust.”[358]