“Oh, how I have been deceived!” she exclaimed.  “I expected an ambassador, and behold a herald!  In all my life I never heard of such an oration.  Your boldness and unadvised temerity I cannot sufficiently admire.  But if the king your master has given you any such thing in charge—­which I much doubt—­I believe it is because, being but a young man, and lately advanced to the crown, not by ordinary succession of blood, but by election, he understandeth not yet the way of such affairs.”  And so on—­for several minutes longer.

Never did envoy receive such a setting down from sovereign.

“God’s death, my lords!” said the queen to her ministers; as she concluded, “I have been enforced this day to scour up my old Latin that hath lain long in rusting.”

This combination of ready wit, high spirit, and good Latin, justly excited the enthusiasm of the queen’s subjects, and endeared her still more to every English heart.  It may, however, be doubted whether the famous reply was in reality so entirely extemporaneous as it has usually been considered.  The States-General had lost no time in forwarding to England a minute account of the proceedings of Paul Dialyn at the Hague, together with a sketch of his harangue and of the reply on behalf of the States.  Her Majesty and her counsellors therefore, knowing that the same envoy was on his way to England with a similar errand, may be supposed to have had leisure to prepare the famous impromptu.  Moreover, it is difficult to understand, on the presumption that these classic utterances were purely extemporaneous, how they have kept their place in all chronicles and histories from that day to the present, without change of a word in the text.  Surely there was no stenographer present to take down the queen’s words as they fell from her lips.

The military events of the year did not testify to a much more successful activity on the part of the new league in the field than it had displayed in the sphere of diplomacy.  In vain did the envoy of the republic urge Henry and his counsellors to follow up the crushing blow dealt to the cardinal at Turnhout by vigorous operations in conjunction with the States’ forces in Artois and Hainault.  For Amiens had meantime been taken, and it was now necessary for the king to employ all his energy and all his resources to recover that important city.  So much damage to the cause of the republic and of the new league had the little yellow Spanish captain inflicted in an hour, with his bags of chestnuts and walnuts.  The siege of Amiens lasted nearly six months, and was the main event of the campaign, so far as Henry was concerned.  It is true—­as the reader has already seen, and as will soon be more clearly developed—­that Henry’s heart had been fixed on peace from the moment that he consented in conjunction with the republic to declare war, and that he had entered into secret and separate negotiations for that purpose with the agents of Philip so soon as he had bound himself by solemn covenant with Elizabeth to have no negotiations whatever with him except with her full knowledge and consent.