is strove to league the two countries by a marriage of
Elizabeth with the Duke of Anjou. Such a match would have been a purely
political one, for Elizabeth was now forty-eight, and Francis of Anjou
had no qualities either of mind or body to recommend him to the Queen.
But the English ministers pressed for it, Elizabeth amidst all her
coquetries seemed at last ready to marry, and the States seized the
moment to lend themselves to the alliance of the two powers by choosing
the Duke as their lord. Anjou accepted their offer, and crossing to the
Netherlands, drove Parma from Cambray; then sailing again to England, he
spent the winter in a fresh wooing.

[Sidenote: Its failure.]

But the Duke's wooing still proved fruitless. The schemes of diplomacy
found themselves shattered against the religious enthusiasm of the time.
While Orange and Catharine and Elizabeth saw only the political weight
of the marriage as a check upon Philip, the sterner Protestants in
England saw in it a victory for Catholicism at home. Of the difference
between the bigoted Catholicism of Spain and the more tolerant
Catholicism of the court of France such men recked nothing. The memory
of St. Bartholomew's day hung around Catharine of Medicis; and the
success of the Jesuits at this moment roused the dread of a general
conspiracy against Protestantism. A Puritan lawyer named Stubbs only
expressed the alarm of his fellows in his "Discovery of a Gaping Gulf"
in which England was to plunge through the match with Anjou. When the
hand of the pamphleteer was cut off as a penalty for his daring, Stubbs
waved his hat with the hand that was left, and cried "God save Queen
Elizabeth." But the Queen knew how stern a fanaticism went with this
unflinching loyalty, and her dread of a religious conflict within her
realm must have quickened the fears which the worthless temper of her
wooer cannot but have inspired. She gave however no formal refusal of
her hand. So long as coquetry sufficed to hold France and England
together, she was ready to play the coquette; and it was as the future
husband of the Queen that Anjou again appeared in 1582 in the
Netherlands and received the formal submission of the revolted States,
save Holland and Zealand. But the subtle schemes which centred in him
broke down before the selfish perfidy of the Duke. Resolved to be ruler
in more than name, he planned the seizure of the greater cities of the
Netherlands, and at the opening of 1583 mad