Then Elizabeth and her advisers found themselves confronted with increased difficulties, as they usually did when the Catholics in France had a free hand. Catharine and the King saw that France was not big enough to hold at the same time the sovereign and the heir presumptive, and cast about for means to get rid of him profitably. The best suggestion for them came from the Walloon nobles in favour of Spain. Why should not Alençon marry a daughter of the Spanish King and be made Viceroy of Spanish Flanders? The mere whisper of such an arrangement drove Elizabeth into a new course. She might hint, as she did pretty broadly many times, at the marriage of the young Prince with herself, but Alençon thought he saw more advantage elsewhere. For the next three years he was held tightly in the leading-strings of his mother and brother—no longer a Huguenot, but an ostentatiously devout Catholic, hating the King and his surroundings bitterly; jealous, vengeful, and turbulent, but looking for his future to the Catholics and the League rather than to the Queen of England, with whom he kept up just a sufficient pretence of love-making to prevent her from opposing him in Flanders. It was doubly necessary now for Elizabeth to be friendly with Spain; but she could not afford to see Orange utterly crushed, for with the Huguenots and Protestant Holland both subdued, there was no barrier between her and Catholic vengeance. The position was a perplexing one for her. Orange sent over prayers almost daily for help, or he must abandon the struggle. At one time, in December, when the Queen learned that a great deputation of Dutch Protestant nobles were on the way to offer her Holland and Zeeland in exchange for English support,[390] “she entered her chamber alone, slamming the door after her, and crying out that they were ruining her over this business. She declared loudly that she would have no forces sent openly to Holland. She was in such grief that her ladies threatened to burst her door open if she would not admit them, as they could not bear her to be alone in such trouble.”[391] But loudly as she might protest, especially in the hearing of the friends of Spain, and roughly as she might use St. Aldegonde, Paul Buiz, and the rest of the Netherlanders who prayed for aid, she took care, with Burghley’s help, to look fixedly in another direction when men and arms, munitions and money, were sent over to Orange in violation of her own orders.