p II. And there he sat at
his table, scrawling his apostilles. The fine innumerable threads which
stretched across the surface of Christendom, and covered it as with a
net, all converged in that silent cheerless cell. France was kept in a
state of perpetual civil war; the Netherlands had been converted into a
shambles; Ireland was maintained in a state of chronic rebellion;
Scotland was torn with internal feuds, regularly organized and paid for
by Philip; and its young monarch--"that lying King of Scots," as
Leicester called him--was kept in a leash ready to be slipped upon
England, when his master should give the word; and England herself was
palpitating with the daily expectation of seeing a disciplined horde of
brigands let loose upon her shores; and all this misery, past, present,
and future, was almost wholly due to the exertions of that grey-haired
letter-writer at his peaceful library-table.

At the very beginning of the year the King of Denmark had made an offer
to Philip of mediation. The letter, entrusted to a young Count de
Rantzan, had been intercepted by the States--the envoy not having availed
himself, in time, of his diplomatic capacity, and having in consequence
been treated, for a moment, like a prisoner of war. The States had
immediately addressed earnest letters of protest to Queen Elizabeth,
declaring that nothing which the enemy could do in war was half so
horrible to them as the mere mention of peace. Life, honour, religion,
liberty, their all, were at stake, they said, and would go down in one
universal shipwreck, if peace should be concluded; and they implored her
Majesty to avert the proposed intercession of the Danish King. Wilkes
wrote to Walsingham denouncing that monarch and his ministers as
stipendiaries of Spain, while, on the other hand, the Duke of Parma,
after courteously thanking the King for his offer of mediation, described
him to Philip as such a dogged heretic, that no good was to be derived
from him, except by meeting his fraudulent offers with an equally
fraudulent response. There will be nothing lost, said Alexander, by
affecting to listen to his proposals, and meantime your Majesty must
proceed with the preparations against England. This was in the first week
of the year 1587.

In February, and almost on the very day when Parma was writing those
affectionate letters to Elizabeth, breathing nothing but peace, he was
carefully conning Philip's directions in regard to the all-imp