treaty on her part with Spain. When these clerical envoys reached
England the Queen was already beginning to wake from her delusion;
although her commissioners were still--as we have seen--hard at work,
pouring sand through their sieves at Ostend, and although the steady
protestations, of the Duke of Parma, and the industrious circulation of
falsehoods by Spanish emissaries, had even caused her wisest statesmen,
for a time, to participate in that delusion.

For it is not so great an impeachment on the sagacity of the great Queen
of England, as it would now appear to those who judge by the light of
subsequent facts, that she still doubted whether the armaments,
notoriously preparing in Spain and Flanders, were intended against
herself; and that even if such were the case--she still believed in the
possibility of averting the danger by negotiation.

So late as the beginning of May, even the far-seeing and anxious
Walsingham could say, that in England "they were doing nothing but
honouring St. George, of whom the Spanish Armada seemed to be afraid.
We hear," he added, "that they will not be ready to set forward before
the midst of May, but I trust that it will be May come twelve months.
The King of Spain is too old and too sickly to fall to conquer kingdoms.
If he be well counselled, his best course will be to settle his own
kingdoms in his own hands."

And even much later, in the middle of July--when the mask was hardly,
maintained--even then there was no certainty as to the movements of the
Armada; and Walsingham believed, just ten days before the famous fleet
was to appear off Plymouth, that it had dispersed and returned to Spain,
never to re-appear. As to Parma's intentions, they were thought to lie
rather in the direction: of Ostend than of England; and Elizabeth; on the