whole realm. A stroke of a
poniard, a touch of a trigger, and swords would be flying from their
scabbards in every county; England would become, like France, one wild
scene of anarchy and civil war. No successor had been named. The Queen
refused to hear a successor declared. Mary Stuart's hand had been in
every plot since she crossed the Border. Twice the House of Commons had
petitioned for her execution. Elizabeth would neither touch her life nor
allow her hopes of the crown to be taken from her. The Bond of
Association was but a remedy of despair, and the Act of Parliament would
have passed for little in the tempest which would immediately rise. The
agony reached a height when the fatal news came from the Netherlands
that there at last assassination had done its work. The Prince of
Orange, after many failures, had been finished, and a libel was found in
the Palace at Westminster exhorting the ladies of the household to
provide a Judith among themselves to rid the world of the English
Holofernes.

One part of Elizabeth's subjects, at any rate, were not disposed to sit
down in patience under the eternal nightmare. From Spain was to come the
army of deliverance for which the Jesuits were so passionately longing.
To the Spaniards the Pope was looking for the execution of the Bull of
Deposition. Father Parsons had left out of his estimate the Protestant
adventurers of London and Plymouth, who, besides their creed and their
patriotism, had their private wrongs to revenge. Philip might talk of
peace, and perhaps in weariness might at times seriously wish for it;
but between the Englishmen whose life was on the ocean and the Spanish
Inquisition, which had burned so many of them, there was no peace
possible. To them, Spain was the natural enemy. Among the daring spirits
who had sailed with Drake round the globe, who had waylaid the Spanish
gold ships, and startled the world with their exploits, the joy of whose
lives had been to fight Spaniards wherever they could meet with them,
there was but one wish--for an honest open war. The great galleons were
to them no objects of terror. The Spanish naval power seemed to them a
'Colossus stuffed with clouts.' They were Protestants all of them, but
their theology was rather practical than speculative. If Italians and
Spaniards chose to believe in the Mass, it was not any affair of theirs.
Their quarrel was with the insolent pretence of Catholics to force their
creed on others with swor