King contained the intelligence that
Queen Elizabeth was, at the date of the letter, residing at St. James's.
Philip, who had no objection to display his knowledge of English
affairs--as became the man who had already been almost sovereign of
England, and meant to be entirely so--supplied a piece of information in
an apostille to this despatch. "St. James is a house of recreation," he
said, "which was once a monastery. There is a park between it, and the
palace which is called Huytal; but why it is called Huytal, I am sure I
don't know." His researches in the English language had not enabled him
to recognize the adjective and substantive out of which the abstruse
compound White-Hall (Huyt-al), was formed.

On another occasion, a letter from England containing important
intelligence concerning the number of soldiers enrolled in that country
to resist the Spanish invasion, the quantity of gunpowder and various
munitions collected, with other details of like nature, furnished besides
a bit of information of less vital interest. "In the windows of the
Queen's presence-chamber they have discovered a great quantity of lice,
all clustered together," said the writer.

Such a minute piece of statistics could not escape the microscopic eye of
Philip. So, disregarding the soldiers and the gunpowder, he commented
only on this last-mentioned clause of the letter; and he did it
cautiously too, as a King surnamed the Prudent should:--

"But perhaps they were fleas," wrote Philip.

Such examples--and many more might be given--sufficiently indicate the
nature of the man on whom such enormous responsibilities rested, and who
had been, by the adulation of his fellow-creatures, elevated into a god.
And we may cast a glance upon him as he sits in his cabinet-buried among
those piles of despatches--and receiving methodically, at stated hours,
Idiaquez, or Moura, or Chincon, to settle the affairs of so many millions
of the human race; and we may watch exactly the progress of that scheme,
concerning which so many contradictory rumours were circulating in
Europe. In the month of April a Walsingham could doubt, even in August an
ingenuous comptroller could disbelieve, the reality of the great project,
and the Pope himself, even while pledging himself to assistance, had been
systematically deceived. He had supposed the whole scheme rendered futile
by the exploit of Drake at Cadiz, and had declared that "the Queen of
England's distaff was worth