ot restore than for the religious inhumanities
which she did. The force came, of course, from the new nobility and the
new wealth they refused to surrender; and the success of this early
pressure proves that the nobility was already stronger than the Crown.
The sceptre had only been used as a crowbar to break open the door of a
treasure-house, and was itself broken, or at least bent, with the blow.

There is a truth also in the popular insistence on the story of Mary
having "Calais" written on her heart, when the last relic of the
mediaeval conquests reverted to France. Mary had the solitary and heroic
half-virtue of the Tudors: she was a patriot. But patriots are often
pathetically behind the times; for the very fact that they dwell on old
enemies often blinds them to new ones. In a later generation Cromwell
exhibited the same error reversed, and continued to keep a hostile eye
on Spain when he should have kept it on France. In our own time the
Jingoes of Fashoda kept it on France when they ought already to have had
it on Germany. With no particular anti-national intention, Mary
nevertheless got herself into an anti-national position towards the most
tremendous international problem of her people. It is the second of the
coincidences that confirmed the sixteenth-century change, and the name
of it was Spain. The daughter of a Spanish queen, she married a Spanish
prince, and probably saw no more in such an alliance than her father had
done. But by the time she was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who was
more cut off from the old religion (though very tenuously attached to
the new one), and by the time the project of a similar Spanish marriage
for Elizabeth herself had fallen through, something had matured which
was wider and mightier than the plots of princes. The Englishman,
standing on his little island as on a lonely boat, had already felt
falling across him the shadow of a tall ship.

Wooden _cliches_ about the birth of the British Empire and the spacious
days of Queen Elizabeth have not merely obscured but contradicted the
crucial truth. From such phrases one would fancy that England, in some
imperial fashion, now first realized that she was great. It would be far
truer to say that she now first realized that she was small. The great
poet of the spacious days does not praise her as spacious, but only as
small, like a jewel. The vision of universal expansion was wholly veiled
until the eighteenth century; and even