sador
that "he was not the queen's hangman:" "these men that you require,"
he said, "deny that they have conspired anything against the queen;
marry, they say they will not be oppressed by mine enemy, and that is
no just cause why I should owe them ill-will."[281] He desired
Noailles, with quiet irony, to tell her majesty "that there was
nothing in the existing treaties to forbid his accepting the services
of English volunteers in the war with the emperor: her majesty might
remember that he had invited her to make a new treaty, and that she
had refused:" "he would act by the just letter of his obligations."[282]

[Footnote 281: Wotton to the Queen: _French MSS._
bundle xi. State Paper Office.]

[Footnote 282: Noailles to the King of France:
_Ambassades_, vol. iii.]

Would her subjects have permitted, the queen would have replied by a
declaration of war. As it was, she could only relieve herself with
indignant words.[283] But Carew and his friends might depend on
support so long as they would make themselves {p.122} useful to
France. Possessed of ships and arms, they were a constant menace to
the Channel, and a constant temptation to the disaffected; and,
growing bitter at last, and believing that Elizabeth's life was on the
point of being sacrificed, they were prepared to support Henry in a
second attempt to seize the Isle of Wight, and to accept the French
competitor for the English crown in the person of the Queen of
Scots.[284] Thus fatally the friends of the Reformation played into
the hands of its enemies. By the solid mass of Englishmen the armed
interference of France was more dreaded than even a Spanish sovereign;
and the heresy became doubly odious which was tampering with the
hereditary enemies of the realm. In London only the revolutionary
spirit continued vigorous, and broke out perpetually in unexpected
forms. At the beginning of March three hundred schoolboys met in a
meadow outside the city walls: half were for Wyatt and for France,
half for the Prince of Spain; and, not all in play (for evidently they
chose their sides by their sympathies), they joined battle, and fought
with the fierceness of grown men. The combat ended in the capture of
the representative of Philip, who was dragged to a gallows, and would
have been hanged upon it, had not the spectators interfered.[285] The
boys were laid hands upon. The youngest were whippe