crime was a calumny of their enemies, invented for their destruction? that if, upon inquiry, the innocence of these unhappy victims should afterwards appear, it was the king’s duty to turn his vengeance on their defamers, who had thus cruelly abused his confidence, had murdered so many of his brave subjects, and had done what in them lay to cover him with everlasting dishonor: and that for her part, she should form her judgment of his intentions by his subsequent conduct; and in the mean time should act as desired by the ambassador and rather pity than blame his master for the extremities to which he had been carried.[*] * Digges, p. 247, 248. Elizabeth was fully sensible of the dangerous situation in which she now stood. In the massacre of Paris, she saw the result of that general conspiracy formed for the extermination of the Protestants; and she knew that she herself, as the head and protectress of the new religion, was exposed to the fury and resentment of the Catholics. The violence and cruelty of the Spaniards in the Low Countries was another branch of the same conspiracy; and as Charles and Philip, two princes nearly allied in perfidy and barbarity, as well as in bigotry, had now laid aside their pretended quarrel, and had avowed the most entire friendship,[*] she had reason, as soon as they had appeased their domestic commotions, to dread the effects of their united counsels. The duke of Guise also, and his family, whom Charles, in order to deceive the admiral, had hitherto kept at a distance, had now acquired an open and entire ascendant in the court of France; and she was sensible that these princes, from personal as well as political reasons, were her declared and implacable enemies. The queen of Scots, their near relation and close confederate, was the pretender to her throne; and though detained in custody, was actuated by a restless spirit, and, besides her foreign allies, possessed numerous and zealous partisans in the heart of the kingdom. For these reasons Elizabeth thought it more prudent not to reject all commerce with the French monarch, but still to listen to the professions of friendship which he made her. She allowed even the negotiations to be renewed for her marriage with the duke of Alençon, Charles’s third brother:[**] those with the duke of Anjou had already been broken off. She sent the earl of Worcester to assist in her name at the baptism of a young princess, born to Charles; but before she agreed to give him this last mark of condescension, she thought it becoming her dignity to renew her expressions of blame, and even of detestation, against the cruelties exercised on his Protestant subjects.[***] Meanwhile, she prepared herself for that attack which seemed to threaten her from the combined power and violence of the Romanists: she fortified Portsmouth, put her fleet in order, exercised her militia, cultivated popularity with her subjects, acted with vigor for the further reduction of Scotland under