But how long was all this to last?  How long were loyal citizens to feel that they were living over a loaded mine?—­throughout their own country, throughout the Continent, at Rome and at Madrid, at Brussels and at Paris, a legion of conspirators were driving their shafts under the English commonwealth.  The Queen might be indifferent to her own danger, but on the Queen’s life hung the peace of the whole realm.  A stroke of a poniard, a touch of a trigger, and swords would be flying from their scabbards in every county; England would become, like France, one wild scene of anarchy and civil war.  No successor had been named.  The Queen refused to hear a successor declared.  Mary Stuart’s hand had been in every plot since she crossed the Border.  Twice the House of Commons had petitioned for her execution.  Elizabeth would neither touch her life nor allow her hopes of the crown to be taken from her.  The Bond of Association was but a remedy of despair, and the Act of Parliament would have passed for little in the tempest which would immediately rise.  The agony reached a height when the fatal news came from the Netherlands that there at last assassination had done its work.  The Prince of Orange, after many failures, had been finished, and a libel was found in the Palace at Westminster exhorting the ladies of the household to provide a Judith among themselves to rid the world of the English Holofernes.

One part of Elizabeth’s subjects, at any rate, were not disposed to sit down in patience under the eternal nightmare.  From Spain was to come the army of deliverance for which the Jesuits were so passionately longing.  To the Spaniards the Pope was looking for the execution of the Bull of Deposition.  Father Parsons had left out of his estimate the Protestant adventurers of London and Plymouth, who, besides their creed and their patriotism, had their private wrongs to revenge.  Philip might talk of peace, and perhaps in weariness might at times seriously wish for it; but between the Englishmen whose life was on the ocean and the Spanish Inquisition, which had burned so many of them, there was no peace possible.  To them, Spain was the natural enemy.  Among the daring spirits who had sailed with Drake round the globe, who had waylaid the Spanish gold ships, and startled the world with their exploits, the joy of whose lives had been to fight Spaniards wherever they could meet with them, there was but one wish—­for an honest open war.  The great galleons were to them no objects of terror.  The Spanish naval power seemed to them a ‘Colossus stuffed with clouts.’  They were Protestants all of them, but their theology was rather practical than speculative.  If Italians and Spaniards chose to believe in the Mass, it was not any affair of theirs.  Their quarrel was with the insolent pretence of Catholics to force their creed on others with sword and cannon.  The spirit which was working in them was the genius of freedom.  On their own element they felt that they could be the spiritual tyrants’ masters.  But as things were going, rebellion was likely to break out at home; their homesteads might be burning, their country overrun with the Prince of Parma’s army, the Inquisition at their own doors, and a Catholic sovereign bringing back the fagots of Smithfield.