obedient Netherlands or Spain.  This was inadmissible, of course, but a week was spent at the outset in reducing the terms to writing; and when the Duke’s propositions were at last produced in the French tongue, they were refused by the Queen’s commissioners, who required that the documents should be in Latin.  Great was the triumph of Dr. Dale, when, after another interval, he found their Latin full of barbarisms and blunders, at which a school-boy would have blushed.  The King’s commissioners, however, while halting in their syntax, had kept steadily to their point.

“You promised a general cessation of aims at our coming,” said Dale, at a conference on the 2/12 June, “and now ye have lingered five times twenty days, and nothing done at all.  The world may see the delays come of you and not of us, and that ye are not so desirous of peace as ye pretend.”

“But as far your invasion of England,” stoutly observed the Earl of Derby, “ye shall find it hot coming thither.  England was never so ready in any former age,—­neither by sea nor by land; but we would show your unreasonableness in proposing a cessation of arms by which ye would bind her Majesty to forbear touching all the Low Countries, and yet leave yourselves at liberty to invade England.”

While they were thus disputing, Secretary Gamier rushed into the room, looking very much frightened, and announced that Lord Henry Seymour’s fleet of thirty-two ships of war was riding off Gravelines, and that he had sent two men on shore who were now waiting in the ante-chamber.

The men being accordingly admitted, handed letters to the English commissioners from Lord Henry, in which he begged to be informed in what terms they were standing, and whether they needed his assistance or countenance in the cause in which they were engaged.  The envoys found his presence very “comfortable,” as it showed the Spanish commissioners that her Majesty was so well provided as to make a cessation of arms less necessary to her than it was to the King.  They therefore sent their thanks to the Lord Admiral, begging him to cruise for a time off Dunkirk and its neighbourhood, that both their enemies and their friends might have a sight of the English ships.

Great was the panic all along the coast at this unexpected demonstration.  The King’s commissioners got into their coaches, and drove down to the coast to look at the fleet, and—­so soon as they appeared—­were received with such a thundering cannonade an hour long, by way of salute, as to convince them, in the opinion of the English envoys, that the Queen had no cause to be afraid of any enemies afloat or ashore.