a good, dear sister and neighbour—­that unless he restrained the cruelty of his governors and their soldiers, he was sure to force his Provinces into allegiance to some other power.  She expressed the danger in which she should be placed if the Spaniards succeeded in establishing their absolute government in the Netherlands, from which position their attacks upon England would be incessant.  She spoke of the enterprise favoured and set on foot by the Pope and by Spain, against the kingdom of Ireland.  She alluded to the dismissal of the Spanish envoy, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, who had been treated by her with great regard for a long time, but who had been afterwards discovered in league with certain ill-disposed and seditious subjects of hers, and with publicly condemned traitors.  That envoy had arranged a plot according to which, as appeared by his secret despatches, an invasion of England by a force of men, coming partly from Spain, and partly from the Netherlands, might be successfully managed, and he had even noted down the necessary number of ships and men, with various other details.  Some of the conspirators had fled, she observed, and were now consorting with Mendoza, who, after his expulsion from England, had been appointed ambassador in Paris; while some had been arrested, and had confessed the plot.  So soon as this envoy had been discovered to be the chief of a rebellion and projected invasion, the Queen had requested him, she said, to leave the kingdom within a reasonable time, as one who was the object of deadly hatred to the English people.  She had then sent an agent to Spain, in order to explain the whole transaction.  That agent had not been allowed even to deliver despatches to the King.

When the French had sought, at a previous period, to establish their authority in Scotland, even as the Spaniards had attempted to do in the Netherlands, and through the enormous ambition of the House of Guise, to undertake the invasion of her kingdom, she had frustrated their plots, even as she meant to suppress these Spanish conspiracies.  She spoke of the Prince of Parma as more disposed by nature to mercy and humanity, than preceding governors had been, but as unable to restrain the blood-thirstiness of Spaniards, increased by long indulgence.  She avowed, in assuming the protection of the Netherlands, and in sending her troops to those countries, but three objects:  peace, founded upon the recognition of religious freedom in the Provinces, restoration of their ancient political liberties, and security for England.  Never could there be tranquillity, for her own realm until these neighbouring countries were tranquil.  These were her ends and aims, despite all that slanderous tongues might invent.  The world, she observed, was overflowing with blasphemous libels, calumnies, scandalous pamphlets; for never had the Devil been so busy in supplying evil tongues with venom against the professors of the Christian religion.