This is not a mere conjecture, at least with regard to the King of Spain,
since it is certain that he ordered Taxis and Stuniga to offer the King
forces sufficient to reduce all the chiefs of the League and the
Protestant party, without annexing any other condition to this offer than
a strict alliance between the two crowns, and an agreement that the King
should give no assistance to the rebels in the Low Countries. Philip II
judged of Henry by himself, and considered his conversion only as the
principle of a new political system, which made it necessary for him to
break through his former engagements. It may not, perhaps, be useless to
mention here an observation I have made on the conduct of Spain, which
is, that although before and after the death of Catherine de' Medicis she
had put a thousand different springs in motion, changed parties and
interests as she thought most expedient to draw advantages from the
divisions that shook this kingdom, yet the Protestant party was the only
one to which she never made any application: she had often publicly
protested that she never had the least intention to gain or suffer their
alliance.
It is by an effect of this very antipathy that the Spaniards have
constantly refused the Reformed religion admission into their states--an
antipathy which cannot be attributed to anything but the republican
principles the Protestants are accused of having imbibed.
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