Meantime the negotiations for peace continued, and Elizabeth, strange to say, persisted in listening.  She would not see what was plain to all the world besides.  The execution of the Queen of Scots lay on her spirit and threw her back into the obstinate humour which had made Walsingham so often despair of her safety.  For two months after that scene at Fotheringay she had refused to see Burghley, and would consult no one but Sir James Crofts and her Spanish-tempered ladies.  She knew that Spain now intended that she should betray the towns in the Low Countries, yet she was blind to the infamy which it would bring upon her.  She left her troops there without their wages to shiver into mutiny.  She named commissioners, with Sir James Crofts at their head, to go to Ostend and treat with Parma, and if she had not resolved on an act of treachery she at least played with the temptation, and persuaded herself that if she chose to make over the towns to Philip, she would be only restoring them to their lawful owner.

Burghley and Walsingham, you can see from their letters, believed now that Elizabeth had ruined herself at last.  Happily her moods were variable as the weather.  She was forced to see the condition to which she had reduced her affairs in the Low Countries by the appearance of a number of starving wretches who had deserted from the garrisons there and had come across to clamour for their pay at her own palace gates.  If she had no troops in the field but a mutinous and starving rabble, she might get no terms at all.  It might be well to show Philip that on one element at least she could still be dangerous.  She had lost nothing by the bold actions of Drake and the privateers.  With half a heart she allowed Drake to fit them out again, take the Buonaventura, a ship of her own, to carry his flag, and go down to the coast of Spain and see what was going on.  He was not to do too much.  She sent a vice-admiral with him, in the Lion, to be a check on over-audacity.  Drake knew how to deal with embarrassing vice-admirals.  His own adventurers would sail, if he ordered, to the Mountains of the Moon, and be quite certain that it was the right place to go to.  Once under way and on the blue water he would go his own course and run his own risks.  Cadiz Harbour was thronged with transports, provision ships, powder vessels—­a hundred sail of them—­many of a thousand tons and over, loading with stores for the Armada.  There were thirty sail of adventurers, the smartest ships afloat on the ocean, and sailed by the smartest seamen that ever handled rope or tiller.  Something might be done at Cadiz if he did not say too much about it.  The leave had been given to him to go, but he knew by experience, and Burghley again warned him, that it might, and probably would, be revoked if he waited too long.  The moment was his own, and he used it.  He was but just in time.  Before his sails were under the horizon a courier galloped into Plymouth with orders that under no condition was he to enter port or haven of the King of Spain, or injure Spanish subjects.  What else was he going out for?  He had guessed how it would be.  Comedy or earnest he could not tell.  If earnest, some such order would be sent after him, and he had not an instant to lose.