believed to be on the point of calling him to answer a charge of heresy. Even when she was freed from part of her troubles in the autumn of 1558 by the opening of conferences for peace at Cambray a fresh danger disclosed itself. The demands of the queen's envoys for the restoration of Calais met with so stubborn a refusal from France that it seemed as if England would be left alone to bear the brunt of a future struggle, for Mary's fierce pride, had she lived, could hardly have bowed to the surrender of the town. But the Queen was dying. Her health had long been weak, and the miseries and failure of her reign hastened the progress of disease. Already enfeebled, she was attacked as winter drew near by a fever which was at this time ravaging the country, and on the seventeenth of November, 1558, she breathed her last. CHAPTER III THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH 1558-1561 [Sidenote: Elizabeth's accession.] Tradition still points out the tree in Hatfield Park beneath which Elizabeth was sitting when she received the news of her peaceful accession to the throne. She fell on her knees, and drawing a long breath, exclaimed at last, "It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." To the last these words remained stamped on the golden coinage of the Queen. The sense never left her that her preservation and her reign were the issues of a direct interposition of God. Daring and self-confident indeed as was her temper, it was awed into seriousness by the weight of responsibility which fell on her with her sister's death. Never had the fortunes of England sunk to a lower ebb. Dragged at the heels of Philip into a useless and ruinous war, the country was left without an ally save Spain. The loss of Calais gave France the mastery of the Channel, and seemed to English eyes "to introduce the French King within the threshold of our house." "If God start not forth to the helm," wrote the Council in an appeal to the country, "we be at the point of greatest misery that can happen to any people, which is to become thrall to a foreign nation." The French king in fact "bestrode the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland." Ireland too was torn with civil war, while Scotland, always a danger in the north, had become formidable through the French marriage of its queen. In presence of enemies such as these, the country lay helpless, without army or fleet, or the means of manning one, for the treasury, already drained by the waste of Edward's reign, had been utterly exhausted by the restoration of the Church lands in possession of the Crown and by the cost of the war with France. But formidable as was the danger from without, it was little to the danger from within. The country was humiliated by defeat and brought to the verge of rebellion by the bloodshed and misgovernment of Mary's reign. The social discontent which had been trampled down for a while by the horsemen of Somerset remained a menace to further order.