ce. So long as France and England were at war, so long as a French
force might at any moment be despatched to Mary's aid, it was impossible
for them to put pressure on the Queen; and bold as was the action of the
preachers the Queen only waited her opportunity for dealing them a fatal
blow. But whatever hopes Mary may have founded on the strife, they were
soon brought to an end. Catharine used her triumph only to carry out her
system of balance, and to resist the joint remonstrance of the Pope, the
Emperor, and the King of Spain against her edict of toleration. The
policy of Elizabeth, on the other hand, was too much identified with
Catharine's success to leave room for further hostilities; and a treaty
of peace between the two countries was concluded in the spring of 1564.

[Sidenote: Darnley.]

The peace with France marked a crisis in the struggle between the rival
Queens. It left Elizabeth secure against a Catholic rising and free to
meet the pressure from the north. But it dashed the last hopes of Mary
Stuart to the ground. The policy which she had pursued from her landing
in Scotland had proved a failure in the end at which it aimed. Her
religious toleration, her patience, her fair speeches, had failed to win
from Elizabeth a promise of the succession. And meanwhile the Calvinism
she hated was growing bolder and bolder about her. The strife of
religion in France had woke a fiercer bigotry in the Scotch preachers.
Knox had discovered her plans of reaction, had publicly denounced her
designs of a Catholic marriage, and had met her angry tears, her threats
of vengeance, with a cool defiance. All that Murray's policy seemed to
have really done was to estrange from her the English Catholics. Already
alienated from Mary by her connexion with France, which they still
regarded as a half-heretic power, and by the hostility of Philip, in
whom they trusted as a pure Catholic, the adherents of the older faith
could hardly believe in the Queen's fidelity to their religion when they
saw her abandoning Scotland to heresy and holding out hopes of her
acceptance of the Anglican creed. Her presence had roused them to a new
energy, and they were drifting more and more as the strife waxed warmer
abroad to dreams of forcing on Elizabeth a Catholic successor. But as
yet their hopes turned not so much to Mary Stuart as to the youth who
stood next to the Scottish Queen in the line of blood. Henry Stuart,
Lord Darnley, was a son of the Cou