and Camden have gratefully recorded their obligations
both to his liberality and to his honorable exertion of court interest.

The articles of the marriage-treaty were at length concluded between the
commissioners of France and England, and it was stipulated that the
nuptials should take place six weeks after their ratification: but
Elizabeth, whose uncertainties were not yet at an end, had insisted on a
separate article purporting, that she should not however be obliged to
complete the marriage until further matters, not specified, should have
been settled between herself and the duke of Anjou; by which stipulation
it still remained in her power to render the whole negotiation vain.

The moment that all opposition on the part of her privy-council was
over, and every external obstacle surmounted, Elizabeth seems to have
begun to recover her sound discretion, and to see in their true
magnitude all the objections to which she had hitherto been anxious to
blind her own eyes and those of others. She sent Walsingham to open new
negotiations at Paris, and to try whether the league offensive and
defensive, stipulated by the late articles, could not be brought to
effect before the marriage, which she now discovered that it was not a
convenient season to complete. The French court, after some hesitation,
had just been brought to agree to this proposal, when she inclined again
to go on with the marriage; but no sooner had it resumed with alacrity
this part of the discussion, than she again declared for the alliance.
Walsingham, puzzled and vexed by such a series of capricious changes,
proceeding from motives in which state-expediency had no share, remained
uncertain how to act; and at length all the politicians English and
French, equally disconcerted, seem to have acquiesced in the conviction
that this strange strife must end where it began, in the bosom of
Elizabeth herself, while nothing was left to them but to await the
result in anxious silence. But the duke of Anjou, aware that from a
youthful lover some unequivocal symptoms of impatience would be
required, and that upon a skilful display of this kind his final success
might depend, brought to a speedy conclusion his campaign in the
Netherlands, which a liberal supply of money from the English queen, who
now concurred in his views, had rendered uniformly successful, and
putting his army into winter-quarters, hurried over to England to throw
himself at her feet.

He was we