or defending Leicester, and Leicester
abused Burghley for taking part against him.

The Lord-Treasurer, overcome with "grief which pierced both his body and
his heart," battled his way--as best he could--through the throng of
dangers which beset the path of England in that great crisis. It was most
obvious to every statesman in the realm that this was not the time--when
the gauntlet had been thrown full in the face of Philip and Sixtus and
all Catholicism, by the condemnation of Mary--to leave the Netherland
cause "at random," and these outer bulwarks of her own kingdom
insufficiently protected.

"Your Majesty will hear," wrote Parma to Philip, "of the disastrous,
lamentable, and pitiful end of the poor Queen of Scots. Although for her
it will be immortal glory, and she will be placed among the number of the
many martyrs whose blood has been shed in the kingdom of England, and be
crowned in Heaven with a diadem more precious than the one she wore on
earth, nevertheless one cannot repress one's natural emotions. I believe
firmly that this cruel deed will be the concluding crime of the many
which that Englishwoman has committed, and that our Lord will be pleased
that she shall at last receive the chastisement which she has these many
long years deserved, and which has been reserved till now, for her
greater ruin and confusion."--[Parma to Philip IL, 22 March. 1587. (Arch.
de Simancas, MS.)]--And with this, the Duke proceeded to discuss the all
important and rapidly-preparing invasion of England. Farnese was not the
man to be deceived by the affected reluctance of Elizabeth before Mary's
scaffold, although he was soon to show that he was himself a master in
the science of grimace. For Elizabeth--more than ever disposed to be
friends with Spain and Rome, now that war to the knife was made
inevitable--was wistfully regarding that trap of negotiation, against
which all her best friends were endeavouring to warn her. She was more
ill-natured than ever to the Provinces, she turned her back upon the
Warnese, she affronted Henry III. by affecting to believe in the fable of
his envoy's complicity in the Stafford conspiracy against her life.

"I pray God to open her eyes," said Walsingham, "to see the evident peril
of the course she now holdeth . . . . If it had pleased her to have
followed the advice given her touching the French ambassador, our ships
had been released . . . . but she has taken a very strange course by
writing a