whose wit
and valour she had always heartily admired, Henry, on his part, while
unmercifully ridiculing that preterhuman vanity which he fed with
fantastic adulation, never failed to do justice to her genius, and had
been for a moment disposed to cross the channel, or even to hold council
with her on board ship midway between the two countries. It was however
found impracticable to arrange any such meeting, and the gossips of the
day hinted that the great Henry, whose delight was in battle, and who had
never been known to shrink from danger on dry land, was appalled at the
idea of sea-sickness, and even dreaded the chance of being kidnapped by
the English pirates.

The corsairs who drove so profitable a business at that period by
plundering the merchantmen of their enemy, of their Dutch and French
allies, and of their own nation, would assuredly have been pleased with
such a prize.

The queen had confided to De Bethune that she had some thing to say to
the king which she could never reveal to other ears than his, but when
the proposed visit of Henry was abandoned, it was decided that his
confidential minister should slip across the channel before Elizabeth
returned to her palace at Greenwich.

De Bethune accordingly came incognito from Calais to Dover, in which port
he had a long and most confidential interview with the queen. Then and
there the woman, nearly seventy years of age, who governed despotically
the half of a small island, while the other half was in the possession of
a man whose mother she had slain, and of a people who hated the English
more than they hated the Spaniards or the French--a queen with some three
millions of loyal but most turbulent subjects in one island, and with
about half-a-million ferocious rebels in another requiring usually an
army of twenty thousand disciplined soldiers to keep them in a kind of
subjugation, with a revenue fluctuating between eight hundred thousand
pounds sterling, and the half of that sum, and with a navy of a hundred
privateersmen--disclosed to the French envoy a vast plan for regulating
the polity and the religion of the civilized world, and for remodelling
the map of Europe.

There should be three religions, said Elizabeth--not counting the
dispensation from Mecca, about which Turk and Hun might be permitted to
continue their struggle on the crepuscular limits of civilization.
Everywhere else there should be toleration only for the churches of
Peter, of Luther,