hat at least one of these Powers had sanctioned the issue of the Bull.
This of course helped greatly to complicate further the already
complicated political position. Steps were taken immediately to
strengthen England's position against Scotland with whom it was now, more
than ever, to be feared that France would co-operate; and the Channel
Fleet was reinforced under Lord Clinton, and placed with respect to
France in what was almost a state of war, while it was already in an
informal state of war with Spain. There was fierce confusion in the Privy
Council. Elizabeth, who at once began to vacillate under the combined
threats of La Mothe, the French ambassador, and the arguments of the
friend of Catholics, Lord Arundel, was counter-threatened with ruin by
Lord Keeper Bacon unless she would throw in her lot finally with the
Protestants and continue her hostility and resistance to the Catholic
Scotch party. But in spite of Bacon Elizabeth's heart failed her, and if
it had not been for the rashness of Mary Stuart's friends, Lord
Southampton and the Bishop of Ross, the Queen might have been induced to
substitute conciliation for severity towards Mary and the Catholic party
generally. Southampton was arrested, and again there followed the further
encouragement of the Protestant camp by the rising fortunes of the
Huguenots and the temporary reverses to French Catholicism; so the
pendulum swung this way and that. Elizabeth's policy changed almost from
day to day. She was tormented with temporal fears of a continental
crusade against her, and by the spiritual terrors of the Pope's Bull; and
her unfathomable fickleness was the despair of her servants.

Meanwhile in the religious world a furious paper war broke out; and
volleys from both sides followed the solemn roar and crash of _Regnans
in Excelsis_.

But while the war of words went on, and the theological assaults and
charges were given and received, repulsed or avoided, something practical
must, it was felt, be done immediately; and search was made high and low
for other copies of the Bull. The lawyers in the previous year had fallen
under suspicion of religious unsoundness; judges could not be trusted to
convict Catholics accused of their religion; and counsel was unwilling to
prosecute them; therefore the first inquisition was made in the Inns of
Court; and almost immediately a copy of the Bull was found in the room of
a student in Lincoln's Inn, who upon the rack in the Tow