But the notification from the Board of Trade was an ominous development for Sir Edward and his scheme; and even more ominous signs were to follow. During March, anti-tunneling forces in Britain circulated a great petition among prominent Englishmen against the scheme, for presentation to Parliament. The petition, recording the conviction of the signatories that a Channel tunnel "would involve this country in military dangers and liabilities from which, as an island, it has hitherto been happily free," was published in the April issue of _The Nineteenth Century_, and it was signed not only by military people but by many of the most diversely eminent literary, scientific, and ecclesiastical men of the day—including Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, Professor T. H. Huxley, Cardinals Newman and Manning, and the Archbishop of York—as well as a great cloud of names from the nobility and the landed gentry. In an eloquent article accompanying the petition, the editor of _The Nineteenth Century_, James Knowles, implicitly added the name of William Shakespeare to the list of anti-tunnel signatories by invoking the John of Gaunt speech from _Richard II_: This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-Paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands.... The editor went on to declare, more prosaically, that "To hang the safety of England at some most critical instant upon the correct working of a tap, or of any mechanical contrivance, is quite beyond the faith of this generation of Englishmen." Almost at the instant that the heavy blow of the petition in _The Nineteenth Century_ fell upon the tunnel promoters, the Board of Trade sent down a real thunderbolt upon their heads. On April 1, the Board of Trade wrote Sir Edward Watkin that, whatever might be the title to the foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff, there was no doubt as to the title of the Crown under the bed of the sea below low-water mark and within the three-mile limit. It informed him that according to the department's calculations, based on a tracing of the tunnel route previously obtained from the Submarine Continental Railway Company, the boring of the tunnel now must necessarily be close to the point of low-water mark. And, as a consequence, the Board of Trade instructed the company that, pending the outcome of the Government's deliberations on the military security of the tunnel, it must suspend its boring operations forthwith and give the Government assurances to that effect.