however refused to submit to our laws. He spoke insolently of the King's Majesty our Sovereign, resisted the arrest, and sailed away in contempt. Madam, these insolences, these spoils and larcenies of the King's subjects, cannot continue thus without redress. It is provided in the treaties of intercourse between us, that the perpetrators of violent acts shall be arrested and kept in ward till they have made satisfaction, and shall be punished according to their demerits. I beseech you, Madam, to take order in these matters, and inflict some signal chastisement, as an example to all other evil-doers. I require that the losses of our merchants be made goodbeing as they are molested and troubled on so many sides by the subjects of your Majesty. These, Madam, are things that can no longer be endured.'

1

Had Philip been satisfied with the state of affairs in France he would probably have now made common cause with Catherine de Medici, declared war against Elizabeth, and proclaimed Mary Stuart Queen of England. But the break-up of the Catholic league on the death of the Duke of Guise, the return of Montmorency to power, and his reconciliation with Condé, had reinstated in Catherine's cabinet the old French party which was most jealous of Spain, and was most disposed to temporize with the Protestants. Philip felt his early fears revive that Mary Stuart's allegiance to France might prove stronger than her gratitude to himself, and he hesitated to take a step which might cripple his predominance in

1 Margaret of Parma to Elizabeth, December 19, 1563: Flanders MSS. Rolls House.

Europe. He was uneasy at the increasing disaffection of the United Provinces, which a war with England would inevitably aggravate; and though again and again on the verge of a rupture with his sister-in-law, he drew back at the last moment, feeling 'that the apple was not ripe.' Determined however to check the audacity of the privateers, and those darker cruelties of Cobham and his friends, he issued a sudden order in January, 1564, for the arrest of every English ship in the Spanish harbours, with their crews and owners. Thirty large vessels were seized; a thousand sailors and merchants were locked up in Spanish prisons, and English traders were excluded by a general order from the ports of the Low Countries. An estimate was made of the collective damage inflicted by the English cruisers, and a bill was presented to Sir Thomas Chaloner for a million and a half of ducats, for which the imprisoned crews would be held as securities.3

'Long ago I foretold this,' wrote Chaloner, but I was regarded as a Cassandra. For the present I travail chiefly that our men may be in courteous prison, a great number of whom shall else die of cold and hunger.'

With the French war still upon her hands, Elizabeth was obliged to endure the affront and durst not retaliate. With the Catholic party so powerful, a war with Spain, and the contingencies which might arise from it, was too formidable to be encountered. She wrote humbly to Philip entreating that the innocent should not be made to suffer for the guilty; the wrong which she admitted

1 Chaloner to Elizabeth, January 22, 1564: Spanish MSS. Rolls House. 2 Chaloner to Elizabeth, Jan. 20: MS. Ibid.

might have been done she attributed to the confusion of the times; she protested that she had herself given neither sanction nor encouragement to her subjects' lawless doings; she would do her utmost to suppress the pirates; and if her merchants and sailors were set at liberty she would listen to any proposal which Philip might be pleased to make.1

As an earnest of the good intentions of the Government, the English Prize Courts made large awards of restitution; and it was proposed that a joint commission should sit at Bruges to examine the items of the Spanish claim.

But Elizabeth saw that she must lose no time in settling her differences with France. Peace was hastily concluded; she amused Catherine and frightened Philip with the possibility of her accepting the hand of Charles the Ninth; and by the beginning of the summer which followed the close of the war, she was able to take a bolder tone. The trade with England was of vital moment to the Low Countries. The inhibition which the Regent had issued against English vessels had given

1 Elizabeth to Philip, March 17: | ships, and four or five of the townsMS. Ibid. men slain and hurt. This they term

combatir una tierra del Rey; y, Que es estos? y, Como se puede sufrir?' Sure our men have been very outrageous. It was full time the peace took up, or else I ween they would yet have spoken louder.'

Her subjects themselves were not so submissive. 'One insolence,' wrote Chaloner, ' sundry of the council here have much complained of to me that in Gallicia, upon occasion of certain of our merchants detained by the coregidor of a port-Chaloner to Elizabeth, June 18: town there, the same town was shot MS. Ibid.

at with artillery out of the English

the carrying trade to the Flemings; and the ships in Spain continuing unreleased, Elizabeth on her part at the beginning of May retaliated upon the Duchess of Parma by excluding Flemings from the English ports. The intercourse between the two countries was thus at an end. The Queen bade Chaloner say to Philip, that 'whatever injury might have been done to subjects of Spain, she had more to complain of than he; Spanish ships might have been robbed, but the offenders were but private persons; the banner of England had been trailed in the dirt by public officers of Castile, as if it had been taken in battle from the Turks; English subjects had been seized, imprisoned, flogged, tortured, famished, murdered, and buried like dogs in dungheaps; she too as well as he would bear these wrongs no longer.'1 To the letter of Margaret of Parma she replied with equal haughtiness.

'In the month of January last,' she wrote, 'we received intelligence from our ambassador resident in Spain that all manner of our subjects there, with their ships and goods, were laid under arrest, and that our subjects themselves had been used in such cruel sort by vile imprisonment, torture, and famine, as more extremity could not be showed to the greatest criminal. Nor were there any pretences alleged for this violence, save only that a ship on the way to that country from Flanders was robbed by certain English vessels of war-which indeed might be true, as hitherto we know not any certainty

1 Memorial presented by Sir T. Chaloner to Philip II., June 4, 1564: Spanish MSS. Rolls House.

thereof; and yet no cause to make such a general arrest and imprisonment of so great a multitude of people; whereof none were nor could be charged with any evil fact, but were proved to have come thither only for merchandise. Wherefore being troubled with the miserable complaints of the wives, children, and friends of our subjects oppressed in Spain, and seeing on the one part you will neither by means of your edict permit our subjects to come thither with their cloths, nor to bring any commodity from thence, and on the other none of our subjects may come into any port of Spain but they are taken, imprisoned, and put in danger of death; we appeal to the judgment of indifferent person, any what we can less do but, until some redress made for these intolerable griefs, to prohibit that there be no such free resort of merchandise from thence, to the enriching only of a few merchants of those countries.'1

The English prisoners in Spain had suffered frightfully. Out of the two hundred and forty taken at Gibraltar only eighty, as has been already said, were alive at the end of nine months. The crew of the 'Mary Holway,' of Plymouth, numbered fifty-two when they went in January into the Castle of St Sebastian. By the middle of May twenty-four were dead of ill-usage, and the remaining twenty-eight 'were like to die.' Some notion may be formed from these two instances of the loss of life which had followed on the general arrest.

1 Elizabeth to Margaret of Par- | ma, May 7, 1564: Flanders MSS. Rolls House.

2 The Lords of the English Council to Chaloner, June 1: Spanish MSS. Rolls House.'