nvoys for the restoration
of Calais met with so stubborn a refusal from France that it seemed as
if England would be left alone to bear the brunt of a future struggle,
for Mary's fierce pride, had she lived, could hardly have bowed to the
surrender of the town. But the Queen was dying. Her health had long been
weak, and the miseries and failure of her reign hastened the progress of
disease. Already enfeebled, she was attacked as winter drew near by a
fever which was at this time ravaging the country, and on the
seventeenth of November, 1558, she breathed her last.

CHAPTER III

THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH

1558-1561

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's accession.]

Tradition still points out the tree in Hatfield Park beneath which
Elizabeth was sitting when she received the news of her peaceful
accession to the throne. She fell on her knees, and drawing a long
breath, exclaimed at last, "It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous
in our eyes." To the last these words remained stamped on the golden
coinage of the Queen. The sense never left her that her preservation and
her reign were the issues of a direct interposition of God. Daring and
self-confident indeed as was her temper, it was awed into seriousness by
the weight of responsibility which fell on her with her sister's death.
Never had the fortunes of England sunk to a lower ebb. Dragged at the
heels of Philip into a useless and ruinous war, the country was left
without an ally save Spain. The loss of Calais gave France the mastery
of the Channel, and seemed to English eyes "to introduce the French
King within the threshold of our house." "If God start not forth to the
helm," wrote the Council in an appeal to the country, "we be at the
point of greatest misery that can happen to any people, which is to
become thrall to a foreign nation." The French king in fact "bestrode
the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland." Ireland
too was torn with civil war, while Scotland, always a danger in the
north, had become formidable through the French marriage of its queen.
In presence of enemies such as these, the country lay helpless, without
army or fleet, or the means of manning one, for the treasury, already
drained by the waste of Edward's reign, had been utterly exhausted by
the restoration of the Church lands in possession of the Crown and by
the cost of the war with France. But formidable as was the danger from
without, it was little to the danger fro