The Swedish ambassador was to have been openly reproved by the Queen before the whole Court, but the Queen thought better of it, and received him in the presence of Gardiner and the Marquis of Winchester only. She dismissed him curtly--almost rudely--and told him that after committing such a breach of etiquette as to deliver a letter to her sister before presenting his credentials, he had better go home and never come back to England with such a message as that again. Before Feria left England to see his master in July, 1558, he visited Elizabeth at Hatfield, and did his best to persuade her that she had all Philip’s sympathy, and that her safe course would be to adhere to the Spanish connection. He was no match for her in diplomacy even then, and got nothing but smiles and genial generalities. In November Mary was dying, and Dassonleville, the Flemish agent, wrote to the King begging him to send Feria back again to forward Spanish interests, “as the common people are so full of projects for marrying Madam Elizabeth to the Earl of Arundel or some one else.” On the 8th of November a committee of the Council went to Hatfield to see Elizabeth and deliver to her the dying Queen’s message, begging her “when she should be Queen to maintain the Catholic Church and pay her (Mary’s) debts.” Elizabeth would pledge herself to nothing. She knew now that she must succeed, with or without Mary’s good-will, and she meant to have a free hand. Before the Queen died even, Feria, who had arrived when she was already almost unconscious, hastened to Hatfield to see the coming Queen. So long as he confined himself to courteous commonplace she answered him in the same spirit, but as soon as he began to patronise her and hint that she owed her coming crown to the intervention and support of Philip, she stopped him at once, and said that she would owe it only to her people. She was equally firm and queenly when Feria thus early hinted at her marriage with her Spanish brother-in-law before the breath was out of Mary’s body, and showed a firm determination to hold her own and resist all attempts to place her under the tutelage of Philip. A week afterwards the Queen died, and then began the keen contest of wits around the matrimonial possibilities of Elizabeth, which ended in the making of modern England.