he took the liberty to warn her that if she suffered the Protestants of
France to succumb, with minds so alienated from her that they should
consent to make an accord with the opposite faction, the possession of the
cities would avail her but little against the united forces of the French.
He therefore suggested that it might be quite as well for her Majesty's
interests, "that she should serve the turn of the Huguenots as well as her
own."[164] Truly, Queen Elizabeth was throwing away a glorious opportunity
of displaying magnanimous disinterestedness, and of conciliating the
affection of a powerful party on the continent. In the inevitable struggle
between Protestant England and papal Spain, the possession of such an ally
as the best part of France would be of inestimable value in abridging the
contest or in deciding the result. But the affection of the Huguenots
could be secured by no such cold-blooded compact as that which required
them to appear in the light of an unpatriotic party whose success would
entail the dismemberment of the kingdom. To make such a demand at the very
moment when her own ambassador was writing from Paris that the people "did
daily most cruelly use and kill every person, no age or sex excepted, that
they took to be contrary to their religion," was to show but too clearly
that not religious zeal nor philanthropic tenderness of heart, so much as
pure selfishness, was the motive influencing her.[165] And yet the English
queen was not uninformed of, nor wholly insensible to, the calls of
humanity. She could in fact, on occasion, herself set them forth with
force and pathos. Nothing could surpass the sympathy expressed in her
autograph letter to Mary of Scots, deprecating the resentment of the
latter at Elizabeth's interference--a letter which, as Mr. Froude notices,
was not written by Cecil and merely signed by the queen, but was her own
peculiar and characteristic composition. "Far sooner," she wrote, "would I
pass over those murders on land; far rather would I leave unwritten those
noyades in the rivers--those men and women hacked in pieces; but the
shrieks of the strangled wives, great with child--the cries of the infants
at their mothers' breasts--pierce me through. What drug of rhubarb can
purge the bile which these tyrannies engender?"[166]

The news of the English alliance, although not unexpected, produced a very
natural irritation at the French court. When Throkmorton applied to
Catharine