And thus patiently did Walsingham pick his course, plummet in hand, through the mists and along the quicksands, and faithfully did he hold out signals to his comrade embarked on the same dangerous voyage.  As for the Earl himself, he was shocked at the short-sighted policy of his mistress, mortified by the neglect to which he was exposed, disappointed in his ambitious schemes.  Vehemently and judiciously he insisted upon the necessity of vigorous field operations throughout the spring and summer thus frittered away in frivolous negotiations.  He was for peace, if a lasting and honourable peace could be procured; but he insisted that the only road to such a result was through a “good sharp war.”  His troops were mutinous for want of pay, so that he had been obliged to have a few of them executed, although he protested that he would rather have “gone a thousand miles a-foot” than have done so; and he was crippled by his government at exactly the time when his great adversary’s condition was most forlorn.  Was it strange that the proud Earl should be fretting his heart away when such golden chances were eluding his grasp?  He would “creep upon the ground,” he said, as far as his hands and knees would carry him, to have a good peace for her Majesty, but his care was to have a peace indeed, and not a show of it.  It was the cue of Holland and England to fight before they could expect to deal upon favourable terms with their enemy.  He was quick enough to see that his false colleagues at home were playing into the enemy’s hands.  Victory was what was wanted; victory the Earl pledged himself, if properly seconded, to obtain; and, braggart though he was, it is by no means impossible that he might have redeemed his pledge.  “If her Majesty will use her advantage,” he said, “she shall bring the King, and especially this Prince of Parma, to seek peace in other sort than by way of merchants.”  Of courage and confidence the governor had no lack.  Whether he was capable of outgeneralling Alexander Farnese or no, will be better seen, perhaps, in subsequent chapters; but there is no doubt that he was reasonable enough in thinking, at that juncture, that a hard campaign rather than a “merchant’s brokerage” was required to obtain an honourable peace.  Lofty, indeed, was the scorn of the aristocratic Leicester that “merchants and pedlars should be paltering in so weighty a cause,” and daring to send him a dish of plums when he was hoping half a dozen regiments from the Queen; and a sorry business, in truth, the pedlars had made of it.

Never had there been a more delusive diplomacy, and it was natural that the lieutenant-general abroad and the statesman at home should be sad and indignant, seeing England drifting to utter shipwreck while pursuing that phantom of a pacific haven.  Had Walsingham and himself tampered with the enemy, as some counsellors he could name had done, Leicester asserted that the gallows would be thought too good for them; and yet he hoped he might be hanged if the whole Spanish faction in England could procure for the Queen a peace fit for her to accept.