“We find that Sir Thomas Heneage,” said she to Leicester, “hath gone further—­in assuring the States that we would make no peace without their privity and assent—­than he had commission; for that our direction was—­if our meaning had been well set down, and not mistaken by our Secretary—­that they should have been only let understand that in any treaty that might pass between us and Spain, they might be well assured we would have no less care of their safety than of our own.”  Secretary Walsingham was not likely to mistake her Majesty’s directions in this or any other important affair of state.  Moreover, it so happened that the Queen had, in her own letter to Heneage, made the same statement which she now chose to disavow.  She had often a convenient way of making herself misunderstood, when she thought it desirable to shift responsibility from her own shoulders upon those of others; but upon this occasion she had been sufficiently explicit.  Nevertheless, a scape-goat was necessary, and unhappy the subordinate who happened to be within her Majesty’s reach when a vicarious sacrifice was to be made.  Sir Francis Walsingham was not a man to be brow-beaten or hood-winked, but Heneage was doomed to absorb a fearful amount of royal wrath.

“What phlegmatical reasons soever were made you,” wrote the Queen, who but three weeks before had been so gentle and affectionate to her, ambassador, “how happeneth it that you will not remember, that when a man hath faulted and committed by abettors thereto, neither the one nor the other will willingly make their own retreat.  Jesus! what availeth wit, when it fails the owner at greatest need?  Do that you are bidden, and leave your considerations for your own affairs.  For in some things you had clear commandment, which you did not, and in others none, and did.  We princes be wary enough of our bargains.  Think you I will be bound by your own speech to make no peace for mine own matters without their consent?  It is enough that I injure not their country nor themselves in making peace for them without their consent.  I am assured of your dutiful thoughts, but I am utterly at squares with this childish dealing.”

Blasted by this thunderbolt falling upon his head out of serenest sky, the sad.  Sir.  Thomas remained, for a time, in a state of political annihilation.  ‘Sweet Robin’ meanwhile, though stunned, was unscathed—­thanks to the convenient conductor at his side.  For, in Elizabeth’s court, mediocrity was not always golden, nor was it usually the loftiest mountains that the lightnings smote.  The Earl was deceived by his royal mistress, kept in the dark as to important transactions, left to provide for his famishing’ soldiers as he best might; but the, Queen at that moment, though angry, was not disposed, to trample upon him.  Now that his heart was known to be broken, and his sole object in life to be retirement to remote regions—­India or elsewhere—­there to languish out the brief remainder of his days in prayers for Elizabeth’s happiness, Elizabeth was not inclined very bitterly to upbraid him.  She had too recently been employing herself in binding up his broken heart, and pouring balm into the “scorpion’s sting,” to be willing so soon to deprive him of those alleviations.