And there sat the patient letter-writer in his cabinet, busy with his schemes.  His grey head was whitening fast.  He was sixty years of age.  His frame was slight, his figure stooping, his digestion very weak, his manner more glacial and sepulchral than ever; but if there were a hard-working man in Europe, that man was Philip 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-important business of the invasion.  He was informed by his master, that one hundred vessels, forty of them of largest size, were quite ready, together with 12,000 Spanish infantry, including 3000 of the old legion,