Would her subjects have permitted, the queen would have replied by a declaration of war. As it was, she could only relieve herself with indignant words.[283] But Carew and his friends might depend on support so long as they would make themselves {p.122} useful to France. Possessed of ships and arms, they were a constant menace to the Channel, and a constant temptation to the disaffected; and, growing bitter at last, and believing that Elizabeth's life was on the point of being sacrificed, they were prepared to support Henry in a second attempt to seize the Isle of Wight, and to accept the French competitor for the English crown in the person of the Queen of Scots.[284] Thus fatally the friends of the Reformation played into the hands of its enemies. By the solid mass of Englishmen the armed interference of France was more dreaded than even a Spanish sovereign; and the heresy became doubly odious which was tampering with the hereditary enemies of the realm. In London only the revolutionary spirit continued vigorous, and broke out perpetually in unexpected forms. At the beginning of March three hundred schoolboys met in a meadow outside the city walls: half were for Wyatt and for France, half for the Prince of Spain; and, not all in play (for evidently they chose their sides by their sympathies), they joined battle, and fought with the fierceness of grown men. The combat ended in the capture of the representative of Philip, who was dragged to a gallows, and would have been hanged upon it, had not the spectators interfered.[285] The boys were laid hands upon. The youngest were whipped, the elder imprisoned. It was said that the queen thought of gibbeting one of these innocents in real fact, for an example; or, as Noailles put it, as an expiation for the sins of the people.[286] [Footnote 283: "When the Ambassador replied that his master minded to do justly, her Grace remembering how those traitors be there aided, especially such of them as had conspired her death and were in arms in the field against her; and being not able to bear those words, so contrary to their doings, told the Ambassador that, for her own part, her Majesty minded simply and plainly to perform as she had promised, and might with safe conscience swear she ever meant so; but, for their part, her Grace would not swear so, and being those arrant traitors so entertained there as they be, she could not have found in her heart to have used, in like matter, the semblable part towards his master for the gain of two realms, and with those words she departed."--Gardiner to Wotton: _French MSS._ bundle xi.]