This, indeed, was one of the periods when Burghley’s moderating influence was overborne by Leicester, Walsingham, and the Puritans. The Lord Treasurer still did his best—constantly ill though he was—to stem the violence of the tide, befriending the bishops who were being bitterly attacked,[411] and counselling caution in aiding the Flemings against Spain; but, as we have seen, he was somewhat in the background, and absented himself from court as much as possible. It is curious, however, to see, even under these circumstances, how he was still appealed to by all parties. He was very ill in April at Theobalds, and the Queen happened to be suffering from toothache. Of course Hatton must write to the Lord Treasurer, begging him to come to court and give his advice as to what should be done. The reply is very characteristic. Notwithstanding his own pain he would come up at once, he wrote, if by so doing he could relieve the Queen; but as the physicians advised that the tooth should be extracted, though they dared not tell the Queen so, all he could do would be to urge her Majesty to have it done.[412] Hatton did not care to incur the responsibility of saying so himself, and simply showed the Queen Burghley’s letter. Doubtless Elizabeth took the good advice tendered; for it was only a day or two afterwards that young Gilbert Talbot, Lord Shrewsbury’s son, was walking in the Tilt Yard, Whitehall, one morning, under the Queen’s windows, when her maiden Majesty herself came to the casement in her night-dress, in full view of Talbot, who wrote: “My eye fell towards her, and she showed to be greatly ashamed thereof, for that she was unready and in her night-stuff; so when she saw me after dinner as she went to walk, she gave me a great fillip on the forehead, and told the Lord Chamberlain how I had seen her that morning, and how ashamed she was.” Talbot, in writing this to his father (1st May 1578) ends his letter by saying that the Queen was that week to stay three or four days with Burghley at Theobalds. It is plain to see that the renewed severity against the Catholics in England, and the almost ostentatious aiding of the States against Spain, did not meet with the approval of Burghley. He was much more concerned for the moment at the large levies of French troops being collected on the Flemish frontier; and his ordinary policy would have been either to side with the Spaniards against them, or to have disarmed their figurehead Alençon (or Anjou as he was now called) by holding out hopes of his marriage with the Queen, if the earnest attempts of the English to mediate between the States and Don Juan were fruitless. But he had to reckon with Leicester and Walsingham, and the Queen’s policy wavered almost daily between her two sets of counsellors.[413]