the burning of Her Majesty’s ships.  Therefore there should be some good care had of them, but not as it may appear that anything is discovered.  The King has sent a ruby of good price to the Queen of Scots, with letters also which in my judgment were good to be delivered.  The letters be of no importance, but his message by word is to comfort her, and say that he hath now none other care but to place her in her own.  It were good also that Fitzwilliam may have access to the Queen of Scots to render thanks for the delivery of the prisoners who are now at liberty.  It will be a very good colour for your Lordship to confer with him more largely.

’I have sent your Lordship the copy of my pardon from the King of Spain, in the order and manner I have it, with my great titles and honours from the King, from which God deliver me.  Their practices be very mischievous, and they be never idle; but God, I hope, will confound them and turn their devices on their own necks.

                    ’Your Lordship’s most faithfully to my power,
                                                ‘JOHN HAWKINS.’

A few more words will conclude this curious episode.  With the clue obtained by Fitzwilliam, and confessions twisted out of Story and other unwilling witnesses, the Ridolfi conspiracy was unravelled before it broke into act.  Norfolk lost his head.  The inferior miscreants were hanged.  The Queen of Scots had a narrow escape, and the Parliament accentuated the Protestant character of the Church of England by embodying the Thirty-nine Articles in a statute.  Alva, who distrusted Ridolfi from the first and disliked encouraging rebellion, refused to interest himself further in Anglo-Catholic plots.  Elizabeth and Cecil could now breathe more freely, and read Philip a lesson on the danger of plotting against the lives of sovereigns.

So long as England and Spain were nominally at peace, the presence of De la Mark and his privateers in the Downs was at least indecent.  A committee of merchants at Bruges represented that their losses by it amounted (as I said) to three million ducats.  Elizabeth, being now in comparative safety, affected to listen to remonstrances, and orders were sent down to De la Mark that he must prepare to leave.  It is likely that both the Queen and he understood each other, and that De la Mark quite well knew where he was to go, and what he was to do.

Alva now held every fortress in the Low Countries, whether inland or on the coast.  The people were crushed.  The duke’s great statue stood in the square at Antwerp as a symbol of the annihilation of the ancient liberties of the Provinces.  By sea alone the Prince of Orange still continued the unequal struggle; but if he was to maintain himself as a sea power anywhere, he required a harbour of his own in his own country.  Dover and the Thames had served for a time as a base of operations, but it could not last, and without a footing in Holland itself eventual success was impossible.  All the Protestant world was interested in his fate, and De la Mark, with his miscellaneous gathering of Dutch, English, and Huguenot rovers, were ready for any desperate exploit.