mission: “The Count’s instructions are that he is to try and dispose the Queen to consent to Lady Elizabeth’s marriage as her sister, and with the prospect of succeeding to the Crown. This negotiation is being conducted with the utmost secrecy, as they suspect that were the French to learn of it they would easily find means to thwart the project, as the greater part of England is opposed to the Queen and most hostile to King Philip and his party, whilst strongly inclined to Lady Elizabeth, who was always attached to the French faction rather than the other.” Feria tarried a few days in Flanders when the news came that Mary was somewhat better; but Dassonleville’s and Cordova’s letters, foreshadowing, as they did, Mary’s rapid passing, sent him hurrying across to England in order to perform his mission before she should die. The great obstacle to the marriage with Savoy—apart, of course, from Elizabeth’s own reluctance—had now disappeared, for Mary had recognised her sister as her successor, without which her marriage would have been useless to Philip. Feria arrived in London on the 9th November, and he found England in a turmoil. Whispers spread every few days that the Queen was indeed dead, and that her Council only kept back the news until King Philip should come with the strong hand. “Every man’s mynde was then travayled with a strange confusione,” says Hayward, who lived through the crisis, “all things being immoderately eyther dreaded or desired. Every report was greedily both inquired and received, all truthes suspected, diverse tales believed, many improbable conjectures hatched and nourished. Invasion of strangers, civil dissentions, the doubtfull dispositione of the succeeding prince, were cast in every man’s conceite as present perills; but noe man did buysy his witts in contriving remedyes.” Whilst her people were anxiously looking to the future, some with dread and some with hope, the Queen lay in anguish waiting for the end. It was only five years since, full of faith and belief in her system, she had passed over ruined ambitions amidst the acclamations of the people to the throne of her fathers. In that short time, with the best of intentions, she had sapped the basis of England’s international importance, she had opened wide the doors of religious persecution, and, so far as she could, had laid the resources of her country at the feet of her foreign husband. She was leaving England poorer in possessions, in power and in spirit, than it had been at any time since her grandfather brought to an end the civil strife of a century. She had sacrificed her people’s welfare and happiness, as well as her own popularity, by obstinately ignoring accomplished facts and leaning upon a foreign Power to enable her to restore a state of things that was dead.