The last phase of sixteenth-century French–Irish intrigue had its origins in two major insurrections headed by young Anglo-Irish lords, both of whom were militant supporters of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The first of these, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, first cousin of the fourteenth earl of Desmond, staged two rebellions in Munster, in 1569–72 and again in 1579–83, while the second insurgent, Sir James Eustace, third Viscount Baltinglass, led a rebellion in south Leinster in 1580–1 that spawned the so-called Nugent conspiracy of 1581–2. Of the two, the challenge posed by Fitzmaurice was of the greatest consequence in terms of Irish intrigue with the French crown and the Guise faction. Both Fitzmaurice and the ringleaders of the Nugent conspiracy sought the assistance of Catholic continental powers in shows of resistance not against the legitimate monarch of England but against Elizabeth whom they styled a tyrant. In so doing, they gradually gravitated away from the French court towards the papacy and, in particular, towards Philip II who emerged from the mid-1580s onwards as the most promising source of military support for Irish campaigns of resistance to the Elizabethan régime.

Yet in the 1570s Fitzmaurice's targeting of the French monarchy and the Guise faction with requests for financial and military aid for his campaign was well conceived. He arrived in France in March 1575 at a time when French Catholic public opinion was highly sensitised to the need to preserve the Catholic religion in France and elsewhere in western Europe in the face of the threat posed by Protestantism.