It has been seen how close had grown the connection between him and the Guises, and how cleverly he had worked upon their hopes and fears to bring them entirely under his thumb. Alternate flattery, bribes, and veiled threats at length made Guise the humble servant of Spain. It suited Philip to feed his ambitious dream of grasping all, or part, of the French realm, to promise and pay him great subsidies, as he did, to carry on war in his own country, because, in the first place, it weakened Catharine and the Huguenots; and, secondly, it left Philip a free hand in England and Scotland. By the aid of Spanish money and his own dashing popularity, Guise began by completely gaining to his side the mob of Paris, and then through all France the Catholic party was gradually drawn into a great organisation, which enabled Guise to treat with Philip on something like reciprocal terms. By the spring of 1585 the bases of the Holy League had been established. The idea was an ambitious one, but doubtless many of its principal adherents had no inkling of how completely the ultimate object of the whole organisation was designed for the furthering of Philip’s political ends, under cover of a purely religious movement. The dismemberment of France under his auspices would have been a master-stroke of policy, and such a consummation seemed at one time to be almost a certainty. To begin with, an attempt was made to seduce Henry of Navarre into the League; but he was wary and would not be caught, and consequently, in Philip’s view, must be crushed. If he had consented to be satisfied with Béarn and the south-west, Guise might well have had the east, the Duke of Savoy Provence, and Philip’s daughter, Isabel, in right of her mother, would have inherited Brittany, whilst Philip would have had a slice of Picardy and French Flanders. When it was found that Henry of Navarre would not be cajoled into abandoning any portion of his rightful claim to the whole realm, the League and Philip induced Sixtus V. to fulminate his famous bull (September 1585) excommunicating him, his cousin Condé, “and the whole of this bastard and detestable race of Bourbon.” They and theirs were to be deprived of all their principalities for ever, and the excommunication extended to all their adherents. Henry’s reply was as violent as the provocation. “The man who calls himself Pope Sixtus is himself a liar and a heretic.” It only needed this bull again to set flame to the smouldering ashes of the religious war. Henry III. had already been forced into signing the infamous treaty of Nemours, depriving the Huguenots of all toleration, and he became for a time, with bitter hatred in his heart, the bond-slave of Guise. The poor wretch tried in his weak, silly way to get free by forming fresh connections with Elizabeth, with the German Lutherans, with Henry of Navarre, but no party took much notice of him now, and the war went on, the king being a fugitive from his own capital, and Philip afar off smiling at the success of his schemes for setting his neighbours by the ears and paralysing the arms of France that might help Elizabeth against the Armada. For one moment it looked possible, after Philip’s weakness had been demonstrated at sea, that all Frenchmen might band together, forget their dissensions, and turn upon the common enemy; but Guise was tied hard and fast to Philip by this time, and his ambitions were high. The Paris mob was at his bidding, and the clergy throughout France. The wretched king, Henry III., saw no other way out of his dilemma than to have Guise and his brother killed (December 23, 1588). They had been warned by Philip’s agents and others many times that this was intended, but Guise scorned to show any fear, and he fell. With the murder of Guise it seemed for a time as if the Spanish king’s intrigues in France had turned out as fruitless as his efforts against England.