large sum of money, then Gardiner, Courtney’s greatest friend, was reluctantly won with the promise of a cardinal’s hat, and others by similar means; but the self-seeking Earl of Arundel immediately saw how his own interests might be benefited by the Spanish match. De Noailles says that he knew that at the Queen’s age, and with her health, every month’s delay decreased the probability of her having issue; and he, therefore, warmly supported the marriage with Philip, which could not be rapidly effected, in order to marry his young son to Elizabeth, and so, practically, get the reversion to the crown. The matter never seems to have got beyond a suggestion; and the youth soon after dying, Arundel, as will be told, subsequently became a suitor himself. But whilst these nebulous speculations with regard to Elizabeth’s hand were going on, Renard had been arranging a clever scheme by which the Spanish party should ensure to themselves the control of England not only during the Queen’s life but after her death. When Egmont and his splendid embassy arrived all England was in a whirlwind of panic and indignation at the idea of a Spanish match. Elizabeth had retired to Woodstock, ostensibly on friendly terms with the Queen, but deeply wounded at her contemptuous treatment, and at the equivocal position she occupied, now that the divorce pronounced by Cranmer of Henry VIII. and Catharine of Aragon had been quashed, and Elizabeth consequently bastardised. Egmont was instructed to point out to the Queen that all might be pleasantly settled by marrying her sister to the gallant young Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, the son of the Emperor’s sister, and consequently first cousin to Philip. His patrimonial states, all but a mere shred of them in the valley of Aosta, had been occupied by the French in the course of the war, and the prince was fighting like a hero in the Emperor’s army. But his blood was the bluest of any in Europe, and before he could marry Elizabeth she must be legitimised and placed in the order of the succession, without which the throne would probably pass on Mary’s death to the French candidate, Mary of Scotland. This was gall and wormwood to Mary Tudor. They could not both be legitimate. If the grounds for the divorce of Queen Catharine were good she was never Henry’s lawful wife, and her daughter had no right to the crown. If they were bad, then Elizabeth was necessarily the bastard that the law of England inferentially had just declared her to be. The King of France, foiled in his attempts to prevent the Queen’s Spanish marriage, instructed de Noailles[13] to use every possible means to hinder a match between Elizabeth and Savoy, “poor and dispossessed as he is”; and, alert as the ambassador was, no great effort on his part was needed. The Queen, bitterly jealous of her sister, who she knew was more or less openly working with the Carews, the Courtneys, the Wyatts and others to undermine her throne,