f Somerset.--Hatton appointed chancellor.--Leicester
returns to Holland--is again recalled.--Disgrace of lord
Buckhurst.--Rupture with Spain.--Preparations against the
Armada.--Notices of the earls of Cumberland and Northumberland--T. and
R. Cecil--earl of Oxford--sir C. Blount--W. Raleigh--lord Howard of
Effingham--Hawkins--Frobisher--Drake.--Leicester appointed
general.--Queen at Tilbury.--Defeat of the Armada.--Introduction of
newspapers.--Death of Leicester.

It is well deserving of remark, that the strongest and most
extraordinary act of the whole administration of Elizabeth,--that which
brought the blood of a sister-queen upon her head and indelible reproach
upon her memory,--appears to have been productive of scarcely any
assignable political effect. It changed her relations with no foreign
power, it altered very little the state of parties at home, it
recommended no new adviser to her favor, it occasioned the displacement
of Davison alone.

She may appear, it is true, to have obtained by this stroke an immunity
from that long series of dark conspiracies by which, during so many
years, she had been disquieted and endangered. To deliver the queen of
Scots was an object for which many men had been willing to risk their
lives; but none were found desperate or chivalrous enough to run the
same hazard in order to avenge her. But the recent detection of
Babington and his associates, and the rigorous justice executed upon
them, was likely, even without the death of Mary, to have deterred from
the speedy repetition of similar practices; and a crisis was now
approaching fitted to suspend the machinations of faction, to check the
operation even of religious bigotry, and to unite all hearts in the
love, all hands in the protection, of their native soil.

Philip of Spain, though he purposely avoided as yet a declaration of
war, was known to be intently occupied upon the means of taking signal
vengeance on the queen of England for all the acts of hostility on her
part of which he thought himself entitled to complain.

Already in the summer of 1587 the ports of Spain and Portugal had begun
to be thronged with vessels of various sorts and every size, destined to
compose that terrible armada from which nothing less than the complete
subjugation of England was anticipated;--already had the pope showered
down his benedictions on the holy enterprise; and, by a bull declaring
the throne of the schismatic princess forfeited to