Chapter V (2)

As soon as the project got wind Elizabeth, Catharine de Medici, and the Scottish Protestants, led by the Earl of Murray, sought an antidote to the threatened evil. The Darnley match was positively patronised both by Elizabeth and Catharine, and Lethington posted off to London eager to negotiate a friendly understanding between England and Scotland before his Catholic mistress should fall into the marriage net of Spain. But the war between Catholics and Protestants in France was now blazing fiercely, and the Guises were fighting for their lives, unable to help their niece or interfere in any way with Elizabeth’s game in Scotland. This made her for the time the mistress of the situation, and she could afford to deal high-handedly with the Queen of Scots, especially after the Duke of Guise himself had been assassinated before Orleans (February, 1563). She threw all her power on the Huguenot side in the struggle, allowing English contingents to join in the fight and subsiding Condé with money. Mary Stuart’s Protestant advisers had tried hard to negotiate an alliance between England and Scotland on Protestant lines in conjunction with the recognition of Mary as Elizabeth’s heiress under the same auspices; and once more Lethington went to London, in February, 1563, to urge his point. He found the Queen coolly evasive, for she had nothing to fear from Mary or her French kinsmen now, and she knew that Philip would not dare to attack her or interfere forcibly in Scotland whilst the Protestants in France were in the ascendant.

Lethington, of course with Mary’s acquiescence, then shifted his ground. He and Murray had always been strong partisans of England, with the idea of securing the succession to Mary of a Protestant Britain; but, out of patience at last with this new rebuff from Elizabeth, they determined to throw over England and Protestantism, and marry Mary to a nominee of Philip and defy Elizabeth to do her worst. So, at dead of night, again and again, Lethington, the Scottish minister, landed from his boat at the dark stairs of Durham House, and remained for hours closeted with Bishop Quadra. The Bishop himself was daily growing more bitter against Elizabeth. She had now openly aided the French Protestants against the Catholics. She had treated him personally with marked contumely, raiding his house on the pretext that people other than his own servants attended Mass there, for she knew she could do all this now with impunity, because Philip could not afford to quarrel with her whilst the Catholics in France were in a bad way. So the Bishop listened eagerly as the Scot told him how the Queen of England had deceived his mistress, and now again had evaded the question of her succession; how she had artfully stepped in by intrigue, and had rendered abortive all the negotiations for the marriage of Mary with a fitting foreign prince, and had tried to drive her into some unworthy marriage. “Had she not better accept any marriage that the Queen of England proposes for her?” asked Quadra, as a feeler, “if in return she obtains her recognition as the heiress of the English Crown?” No, replied Lethington, emphatically. They had made up their mind that the only way was to force Elizabeth, by marrying Mary to a powerful Catholic prince, with sufficient force behind him to maintain the rights of the Queen of Scots. And then, after a little fencing on both sides, he proposed that Don Carlos should become King Consort of Scotland, and afterwards of Great Britain, with Mary for his wife. Mary was, he said, quite resolved never to marry a Protestant or to accept any husband on the bidding of the Queen of England, and if her approaches to Spain were not well received she would offer to marry her young brother-in-law, Charles IX.

This latter declaration, we may well suppose, was only for the purpose of forcing the hand of Philip, for the match would certainly not have been allowed by Catharine de Medici. The old Bishop, aware of this, passed it over with a smile, and said that there was nothing the Queen of England dreaded more than a marriage between Mary Stuart and a friend of Spain. She had been at infinite pains lately to make them believe that she was a Catholic, but now that her friends the Huguenots were in the ascendant she had become less anxious to conciliate them. But were not the Scots Protestants too? he asked. Lethington, Protestant and friend of Knox though he was, minimised the difference between the creed of Scotland and Spain. Religion, he assured the Spaniard, was not really at the bottom of their trouble in Scotland. Both Elizabeth and Catharine, he said, were in mortal fear of the marriage of Don Carlos and Mary of Scotland, as well they might be; for not only would the Prince thus win the most chaste and beautiful bride in the world, “but he would also succeed to almost universal monarchy by adding to the dominions already possessed by your Majesty two entire islands, this and Ireland, the possession of which would give no trouble whatever, having regard to the attachment which the Catholics bear to this marriage and the union of England and Scotland.”

Bishop Quadra, well aware of the vast importance of such a declaration from one of the leaders of the Scottish Protestants, tried to extract precise religious pledges from him. But Lethington had said all he wished to say in the four hours’ conference, and the Bishop, full of encouragement, promised to obtain promptly the King’s answer to the proposal. Lethington’s next move was to approach the discontented English Catholic nobles, already in a ferment at Dudley’s insolence and Cecil’s religious policy. Almost to a man they assured the Scot of their enthusiastic support of a Spanish marriage for Mary and the acceptance of the revolutionary changes that such a marriage would produce in England. “Only let her marry the heir of Spain and we will salute her as our leader,” they said. This could only mean that with Spanish aid Mary and Carlos were to be placed upon the throne of a united Britain, and that Philip would regain the paramountcy he had lost. Elizabeth’s spies soon got wind of all this, and her counter move was a most extraordinary one—no other, indeed, than to offer Dudley as Mary’s husband, with the assurance of her succession to the English Crown after Elizabeth’s death without issue. It was a mere feint and never meant seriously by Elizabeth, but it divided Scottish opinion and unsettled poor Mary herself, and shows how much more than a match Elizabeth was for Philip in diplomacy.

Whilst she, with consummate skill and daring, was ready with such a diversion as this, the Spanish King was pondering, considering, discussing, and receiving reports upon every phase of the Scottish offer. The opportunity was a supreme one for him, and if he had been prompt and bold to seize the chance he might have won England and Scotland by this means. It is true that Don Carlos was a weak, half-witted boy of degenerate type, though this was not generally known at the time, but it would have been sufficient to betroth him to Mary for his father to have gained a right to interfere in Scotland. The Catholics of England were on the alert for any such opportunity, and the Scots, as we have seen by Lethington’s action, were ready to welcome any power strong enough to defend their country from the intrigues by which Elizabeth sought to sap the independence of their ancient realm.

But promptitude was impossible where Philip was concerned. It took him three months to answer the important letter of Bishop Quadra telling him of Lethington’s offer, and when the reply came to London, in June, 1563, it was thoroughly characteristic of the writer. As usual, he wanted to pledge everybody else up to the hilt, whilst himself remaining free behind bland generalities. His greatest praise was for the Bishop’s prudence in hearing what Lethington had said without giving him any plain answer. “And seeing that the bringing about of this marriage may perhaps be the beginning of a reformation in religious matters in England, I have decided to entertain the negotiation You will have it conducted in the same way that it has been commenced if you consider that safe and secret, telling them [the Scots] to inform you of all the engagements and understandings they have in England; and you, who know how valuable such knowledge will be to me, will keep me fully informed of everything. You will advise me step by step of all that happens, but without settling anything except to discover the particulars referred to above, until I send you instructions. You may tell them of my intentions, but urge them above all to use the utmost secrecy in the business and all connected with it, as all the benefit to be derived depends absolutely upon nothing being heard of it until it is an accomplished fact. If it becomes known that I am concerned in any such negotiations, the French will be greatly alarmed and will spare no efforts to frustrate them—or at least to counteract any profitable result that may arise. As for that Queen of England and her heretics, they are so deeply concerned that it is easy to judge what they would do if they heard of it; so, as I say, it is absolutely necessary that you should keep secret and urge secrecy upon all persons with whom you treat.” Philip knew that Cardinal Lorraine was now pressing his niece to marry the Archduke Charles, Elizabeth’s former suitor; but Lethington had scouted him as being useless for their purpose, as being poor and powerless, and Philip was willing to cut out his own close kinsman if he could thus gain England and Scotland for his son, or rather for himself,[149] and above all avoid another French domination of Scotland, which was threatened by Mary’s pretended willingness to marry the King of France.

When Philip’s letter arrived in London the old Bishop was under a cloud. He was accused of holding communication with Arthur Pole in the Tower. It was known that he had been receiving in Durham House emissaries of the Irish Catholics; and Cecil’s spies reported that suspicious boats came often at night to the water gate. To make matters worse, one day in May a hanger-on of the Bishop’s household, an Italian serving lad, had shot at from the back gate of Durham House a Huguenot captain who was swaggering down the Strand towards Whitehall. The would-be assassin had taken refuge in the house, and had sought sanctuary in the Bishop’s own chamber, whence he was smuggled away by boat by the servants and escaped. Search and violation of diplomatic domicile by the officers of the law followed. The Bishop’s servants were interrogated, the house itself placed in the custody of an officer of the Queen, and the old Bishop, with bitterness in his heart, found himself shunned by all and powerless.[150]

So when Philip’s impossible instructions reached the Bishop, affairs had changed. Lethington had been plainly told by Elizabeth that she was well aware that he was plotting to marry his mistress to Don Carlos or the Archduke, but that if she married either she must face her enmity, whereas if she married a friend of England she would make her the heir to her throne. Lethington and the Scots were therefore already wavering, for the fear was that if Mary wedded a Spanish nominee, Elizabeth would make Darnley her heir. The Catholics, too, not unnaturally, seeing the Countess of Lennox, Darnley’s mother, suddenly taken into high favour with Elizabeth, were thinking what an ideal arrangement it would be to marry Mary and her cousin Darnley with Elizabeth’s blessing, and the assured joint succession to her crown. The Bishop knew all this, and had well nigh lost heart when Philip’s letter arrived. He saw how impossible his master’s methods were in the face of Elizabeth’s rapid changes of policy and fertility of resource; for how could he keep the English Catholics in hand and learn all their combinations, or even get them to make any, on vague secret encouragement which might mean nothing? To the Duke of Alba he wrote: “The remedy is a weak one for so dangerous a malady. When they see that instead of giving them a firm reply we come only with halting proposals and inquiries, I know not what they will think. It is useless to ask them to give me information as to the amount of support the Queen of Scots can rely upon in England for the information of his Majesty. Lethington knows well that all this has been done long ago, for, of course, I could not hide my communications from him. We have been approached by the same people about the marriage ... and they have given to Lethington lists of the Catholics and others who would raise troops for the Queen of Scots.”

Almost hopeless of success, therefore, the Bishop sent one of his most confidential servants to Scotland to tell Mary verbally that the ambassador had a very important communication for her if she would send a trustworthy agent to London to receive it. This messenger, Luis de Paz, left London in the middle of July, 1563, and eventually reached Mary whilst she was travelling in the Western Highlands. She had been ardently expecting Philip’s answer, and had with difficulty held off the other suitors, the Archduke Charles and Eric of Sweden, until it arrived. She gave to Quadra’s messenger a favourable verbal reply, but before he reached Langley, in Buckinghamshire, where the Bishop was staying, the old Spanish Churchman was dying. He had plaintively written to Alba shortly before that it was impossible to conduct affairs in England on Philip’s lines. He had done his best but had been beaten. The English scorned and contemned him. He had been expelled from the Queen’s house; he saw his master’s cause daily waning in England, and he knew that only bold, prompt action would regain the lost ground. The hopelessness of moving Philip to such action broke the old man’s heart. Luis de Paz had just time to whisper Mary’s message to him, and the dying man grieved sorely, he said, that he should thus drop just when he might hope to have succeeded. “I can do no more,” he sighed, just before he passed away, and Spanish influence in England was cast further into the background by his death; for Durham Place during his residence there had been the secret trysting-place of all those who hated Elizabeth’s rule. In the absence of any diplomatic channel through which Mary might work the great combination that she dreamed was to give her the crown of Britain under Philip’s protection, the clever, strong diplomacy of Elizabeth carried all before it. Dudley and Darnley were alternately dangled before Mary’s eyes and then withdrawn, until at length came the Lennox _coup d’état_ and the marriage of the Queen of Scots with her cousin Darnley, which for a time took her out of the market.

In the meanwhile every day that passed made it more difficult, and yet more necessary, for the King of Spain to gain the friendship or control of England. Affairs were going worse and worse with him in the Netherlands, where the struggle was assuming the character of a duel to the death between the old traditions of Flemish self-government and the newer absolutism which had already been fixed upon Castile and now threatened the ancient patrimony of Burgundy under Philip. The Reformed religion, or, indeed, any assertion of the lay right of judgment in matters of faith, was to Philip the embodiment of a rebellious spirit against the absolute centralised authority which was the essence of his system of government, and as such had to be crushed at any cost or sacrifice. Almost openly the English Protestants were sympathising with their Flemish brethren, and many Protestant refugees were flocking into England to establish their industries and seek security under a Protestant Queen. Boldness and good fortune had enabled Elizabeth, on the other hand, to take advantage of the jealousy of her neighbours and to gather around her the growing Protestant party which welcomed the national independence she had attained in so few years, whilst Philip’s hesitancy had succeeded entirely in disheartening the English Catholics, who had at first looked upon him as their champion.

The attitude of Elizabeth throughout her intercourse with the Spanish ambassadors had been such, that she had been able to beguile them when it suited her, and to checkmate them at pleasure; for whilst they had to wait for tardy instructions, which when they came always enjoined impracticable conditions, Elizabeth was opportunist and able to change her tack at an hour’s notice, to the utter confusion of her slow antagonist. The hard treatment of Catholics in England and the welcome accorded to the Flemish Protestant refugees had been met by Philip by the cruel persecution in Spain of Englishmen, upon the barest suspicion of heterodoxy; and this had been resented by the recrudescence of the pillage of Spanish and Flemish ships at sea by English rovers. Not content with this, Elizabeth attempted to foster the new Flemish industries in England by imposing restrictions upon the entrance into her ports of certain manufactured goods coming from Flanders. In retaliation the Spanish rulers began a regular war of tariffs against England; and this, by the middle of 1564, had resulted in a general prohibition being issued on both sides, which practically forbade commercial intercourse altogether. Envoys went backwards and forwards for months, trying unsuccessfully to arrange matters; and in these efforts the Flemings were much more anxious than the English; for the latter had secured a good inlet for their cloths to the Continent through Embden, and Elizabeth had given permission for unrestricted export to all other countries but Flanders and Spain.

The Flemish merchants, on the other hand, were almost bankrupt by the loss of the English trade, and were clamorous to Philip to remedy the matter.[151] Elizabeth could afford to stand firm and resist all attempts to force her into an inferior position in the negotiations. She had taken Philip’s measure by this time, and knew that whilst his own Netherlands were seething in revolt, and the Catholic party in France were held in check by the Huguenots, he dared not seriously injure her. So at last it was not the Queen of England, but Philip, who had to speak humbly; and in June, 1564, there arrived in London a Spanish ambassador of rank, a canon of Toledo, Diego Guzman de Silva, on a new errand. His instructions were precise, and his position was quite distinct from that formerly held by haughty Feria and of Bishop Quadra. They had both had for their mission the forcing of a policy upon a new unstable Queen, whilst Guzman was sent to seek a redress of grievances, and by diplomacy and moderation to compass what threats and retaliation had failed to accomplish. Philip’s hands, indeed, were then too full of his own troubles, both in the Mediterranean and Flanders, for him to hope to rule other countries, and bitter as it must have been for him, and still more bitter for the statesmen of the Alba school, he was forced to speak mildly through his new ambassador to the heretic Queen to prevent the ruin of his Catholic Flemish subjects. To this pass had he been brought in six years from the time when in the days of Mary he had worked his will in England almost unchecked.

Guzman was instructed to make vigorous remonstrance to the English Government with regard to the grievances inflicted on Spanish and Flemish trade in many ways; but he was warned that when he saw Queen Elizabeth he was “to compliment her with the fairest words you can use.” “You will tell her, as I write to her, that I send you to reside near her as my ordinary ambassador, with orders to try to please her in all things, as, in effect, we wish you to do, using every possible effort to that end, and to strive to preserve her friendship towards us, and our mutual alliance. You will assure her that nothing will be wanting on my part to this end, as she well knows by the acts we have hitherto done, and the offers we have made to her.” The ambassador was instructed to win over Lord Robert Dudley, “who is so great a favourite of the Queen, and can influence her to the extent you have been informed. With kindness you will try to gain him, and will also strive to make the friendship of the Queen’s Councillors and officers through whose hands affairs pass, so that you may the more readily guide them in the way desired.” His mission was primarily concerned with securing the restoration of Flemish trade and the reopening of the ports on both sides, though he was also to watch closely the coming and going of “heretics” between England and the Netherlands, to persuade Elizabeth, if possible, to extend toleration to the Catholic worship in England,[152] and he was to spy out the Spanish Protestants who had sought refuge there.

But, although he said nothing to his new ambassador, it is evident that Philip was not inclined to accept as permanent his present state of powerlessness in England, and was patiently biding his time until circumstances allowed him to obtain control once more. This is seen by the stress laid upon the importance of gaining Leicester to the Spanish cause, and still more by the instruction that Guzman was stealthily to encourage the hopes of the English Catholics, “with such dissimulation and dexterity as to give no cause for suspicion to the Queen or her advisers, as it is evident that much evil might follow if the contrary were the case.” Guzman was an amiable, easy-going Churchman in favour of peace, and very soon managed to get affairs upon a more friendly footing. The marriage juggle, by which Elizabeth balanced her own supposed marriage against that of Mary Stuart; the prospective bridegrooms, the Archduke Charles, Don Carlos, Don Juan of Austria, the boy King of France, with Leicester always in reserve, being often changed or transferred from one Queen to the other, were looked upon by Guzman with somewhat scornful amusement. He quite understood that these ever-varying phases of advance and recession obeyed the passing political need of Elizabeth and Catharine de Medici, and he was never greatly perturbed by them.

Elizabeth was all graciousness when she received Guzman’s first visit at Richmond on the 22nd June, 1564. He had had no need to seek Dudley, who had begun to cultivate his friendship as soon as he arrived, for what purpose we shall see presently; and the more to do him honour, on the arrival of the ambassador at the palace landing-stage, young Darnley, of the blood royal, was awaiting him, to lead him to the Queen. She was standing, listening to a keyed instrument, when he entered the presence chamber, led by Lord Chamberlain Howard; and as soon as she saw him she came forward and embraced him warmly. Speaking at first in Italian and later in Latin, she expressed her delight at his coming: “As there were some friendly countries trying to make her believe that your Majesty would never again have a representative here, and she was glad that they had turned out false prophets. She said I should be treated and considered commensurately with the deep interest which for many reasons she took in your Majesty’s affairs.” Then, as a diversion, she displayed much curiosity about the mental and physical qualities of young Don Carlos, and talked some prurient nonsense about Philip’s widowed sister, Juana, whom she said she might marry, she (Elizabeth) being the husband and Juana the wife. To impress the ambassador the more with her desire to be friendly, and to attract attention, as usual, to her own charms, she said that the King, her good brother, “had seen her when she was sorrowful, distressed, ill-treated, imprisoned, and afflicted, and that she had grown greatly since then, and even gave me to understand that she had greatly changed in appearance.” She promised the ambassador a prompt settlement of all grievances, and affectionately embracing him again, handed the somewhat dazzled cleric over to the hospitable care of her courtiers. Dudley, Pembroke, Northampton, Clinton, Howard, and Cecil “came separately and embraced me, congratulating me on my arrival, and expressing their pleasure at my coming;” and so, with much suave compliment, Guzman, surprised at the warmth of his reception, was conducted by Darnley to his barge again.

All this new-born delight in Spaniards on the part of Elizabeth and her courtiers was, of course, not without its reason. The fact is that, after all her aid to Condé and his Huguenots, peace had been made in France upon terms which gave predominance to the Catholics; and she considered that Condé had betrayed her in this, as, indeed, he had. Cardinal Lorraine, the bitter enemy of Elizabeth, was now Catharine de Medici’s henchman, and was busy negotiating a renewal of the Catholic League, which boded ill for England and Protestantism if it succeeded. A meeting was to take place between Catharine and her daughter, Elizabeth, Philip’s wife, with Alba and Lorraine in the background, to settle an accord between France and Spain for the utter extermination of Protestantism throughout the world; and even the Bourbon Huguenot princes of France had been temporarily silenced. In the circumstances Elizabeth naturally wooed Spain violently, and before Guzman had been in England a week he found himself in the centre of a real or feigned conspiracy of the unprincipled Dudley, to introduce Catholicism into England under Spanish protection, and depose Elizabeth’s Protestant minister, Cecil. On the pretext that Cecil had helped in the production of a book by John Hales in favour of Catharine Grey’s claim to the succession, Dudley’s friends secretly urged Guzman to recommend Elizabeth to dismiss and punish Cecil, “as if he were out of the way, the affairs of your Majesty would be more favourably dealt with, and religious questions as well, because Cecil and his friends are those who persecute the Catholics and dislike your Majesty, whereas the other man is regarded as faithful, and the rest of the Catholics so consider him, and have adopted him as their instrument.”

Dudley again was willing to become the humble servant of Philip if Cecil could be got out of the way by Guzman’s aid. He hoped still, he told Guzman, to marry the Queen; “he had an understanding already with the Pope, and a person was in Rome to represent him.” When, however, Guzman asked for details of exactly what Lord Robert promised to do with regard to religion, the answers were vague, and the example of Bishop Quadra, moreover, was not lost on his successor. The ambassador knew that Philip was not ready to attack the English Protestants yet, or on the shifty word of Dudley, but he prepared the ground cleverly for future action. The first thing, he told the conspirators, was to bring the Queen into close friendship with the King of Spain, and with the Catholics through him, as otherwise she would not dare to dismiss her Protestant ministers. “All people think,” he wrote to the King, “that the only remedy for the religious trouble is to get these people turned out of power, as they are the mainstay of the heretics, Lord Robert having the Catholics all on his side; and I tell them that they must take these things [_i.e._, the need for fortifying Elizabeth by the friendship of Spain] into consideration when they are seeking a remedy, and that plenty of opportunities will offer themselves, if needed later, to raise war or stop trade.[153] The Catholics are much disturbed, and as they have no other idea than this they will not abandon it until they see some way of gaining their point. Certainly, from what I hear, they are very numerous if they dared to show, or had a leader.”

But desirous as the Queen was to curry favour with the Catholic-Spanish party, and infatuated as she might be with Dudley, she could not dispense with Cecil’s services, and Dudley’s hopes again decreased, notwithstanding Philip’s sympathy expressed through Guzman, who was instructed to offer him all the aid he sought; but only on a distinct promise fully to restore the Catholic religion in England in the event of his marriage.[154] This Dudley could not do, though by innuendo he promised much, and thus Cecil remained unmolested. Elizabeth on this occasion was probably a party to Dudley’s action, for she carried matters almost as far with Guzman herself. She went out of her way several times to hint broadly at her desire to enter into negotiations for her marriage with Don Carlos, without the slightest intention, of course, of ever doing so, even if the health of the Prince had made such a match possible. She assured Guzman that she was really a Catholic at heart, “although she had concealed her real feelings in order to prevail with her subjects.”[155] Some weeks later she ordered a crucifix and ornaments to be placed upon the altar in her chapel, and Guzman told her that the preachers were slandering her for it, whereupon she said that she would order crosses to be placed in all the churches in the realm.[156]

FROM THE PAINTING BY MARC GHEERAEDTS IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY]

Elizabeth, indeed, was seriously alarmed at the impending Catholic League, and in addition to redressing the Spanish trade grievances and lavishing endless blandishments upon Guzman, she made a desperate bid to draw Catharine de Medici to her side by opening negotiations for her own marriage with the boy King of France—negotiations as insincere, doubtless, as the rest, but directed to the same end, namely, the diversion of France and Spain from their threatening friendship, as were also the attempts to revive the now almost outworn subject of the Queens match with the Austrian Archduke. The constant changes perfectly bewildered Guzman, who found Dudley (now created Earl of Leicester) blowing hot and cold. The Catholics, on the one hand, were smiled upon by the Queen, and on the other strong measures were being proposed by Cecil and his friends to stay the growth of “papistry.” But though Philip wrote on behalf of the Catholic English bishops in prison, and Guzman urged for the toleration of Catholic worship, no practical concessions could be obtained from Elizabeth, much as she might smile and suggest to Guzman, with whom she had grown personally very intimate.

In the meanwhile the elaborate preparations for the settlement of the Catholic League by the meeting of the Queens of France and Spain at Bayonne went on, and rumours came to England which caused Elizabeth additional alarm late in 1564, that Philip himself was coming to Flanders in the following year to bring his Flemish subjects into due subjection. Elizabeth’s amiability then grew more intense than ever. “How much she wished her dear brother could stay in one of her ports, that she might regale him!” and Guzman was the object of her constant affectionate solicitude at the numerous balls, feasts, and tourneys to which she invited him, often deploring that his master was not there, too, to enjoy the fun. It must be confessed that, to judge by the relations between Guzman and the French ambassador in England (de Foix), the coming national alliance between their respective countries did not look promising. De Foix had Huguenot leanings, and Guzman always resented his presence at Court at the same time as himself, Elizabeth on several occasions having the greatest difficulty in keeping the peace between them, when by some inadvertence they met in her presence. Indeed, as was soon afterwards proved, the national jealousy of France and Spain and the personal interests of Catharine overrode the Catholic religious object of the League so perseveringly promoted by Cardinal Lorraine and Alba.

On Ash Wednesday, 1565, Elizabeth listened to an open-air sermon preached by Dr. Nowell, Dean of Saint Paul’s, an ardent Reformer, who probably was not a politician. In the course of his sermon he condemned the veneration of images, and Elizabeth angrily told him not to talk upon that subject. Nowell either did not hear her or did not choose to regard the rebuke, and continued, when the Queen again raised her voice and peremptorily commanded him to pass to another subject, as that one was worn out. Soon afterwards de Foix, in conversation with Guzman, remarked that the Queen might have avoided so public and marked an interruption of the preacher. The Spaniard was of another opinion. “I think quite differently,” he said. “Those who sin publicly must be publicly rebuked; and as this Queen does, so might your most Christian King do it: when he gets older he will, I fear, be likely to make more account of the heretics.”

The much feared interview of Bayonne, which the warlike party in Spain hoped would result in the crushing of Protestantism and the eventual submission of England to Spanish dictation, took place in these not very encouraging circumstances in May, 1565. Elizabeth, as a diversion, had been for months negotiating with Catharine for a French marriage, and the Queen Regent of France was taken aback when she saw at Bayonne the articles which she was expected to sign. The total extermination of Protestantism in France and the world over would have meant her personal political extinction, and probably that of her son’s realm; for Philip in that case would have been paramount. What she wanted was not this, but to be able to play the Guises off against the Bourbons, and keep Elizabeth always as a potential ally when the Catholics grew too strong to suit her. At Bayonne, therefore, whilst she ostensibly acceded to everything dictated by Alba and Lorraine, and led her devoutly Catholic and hispanolised daughter to believe that France with all its national power would support her husband’s objects, Catharine no sooner turned her face towards Paris than she began to introduce all sorts of conditions and limitations which stultified the whole plan of the Catholic League, whilst she became more warmly interested than ever in the talk of Elizabeth’s marriage with one of her sons.

The result of the much discussed conferences of Bayonne, in which Philip personally had never been very sanguine, finally disillusioned him as to the practicability of a league with his artful mother-in-law which should make him master of Europe. He had thenceforward no other policy open to him than to revert to the traditional national affinities that had obtained before the religious changes in Europe. He must win England to his side by fair means or foul. For seven years he had tried to isolate her by means of a Catholic league and he had failed: he had spoken arrogantly through Feria, he had tried subtlety through Bishop Quadra, and he had essayed friendly cordiality by means of Guzman. Elizabeth, when it suited her, had been amiability itself, she had languished for a Spanish husband, she had pretended more than once to be a Catholic, she had smiled, pouted, or frowned, as her aims for the moment required; but, notwithstanding all this, the English Catholic bishops were still in durance, Catholic worship was still proscribed, and Philip was further off than ever he had been from controlling English statecraft for his own ends.