“By God’s sufferance,” rejoined the Doctor, “her Majesty is not without means to defend her crown, that hath descended to her from so long a succession of ancestors.  Moreover your Highness knows very well that one battle cannot conquer a kingdom in another country.”

“Well,” said the Duke, “that is in God’s hand.”

“So it is,” said the Doctor.

“But make an end of it,” continued Alexander quietly, “and if you have anything to put into writing; you will do me a pleasure by sending it to me.”

Dr. Valentine Dale was not the man to resist the temptation to make a protocol, and promised one for the next day.

“I am charged only to give your Highness satisfaction,” he said, “as to her Majesty’s sincere intentions, which have already been published to the world in English, French, and Italian, in the hope that you may also satisfy the Queen upon this other point.  I am but one of her commissioners, and could not deal without my colleagues.  I crave leave to depart to-morrow morning, and with safe-convoy, as I had in coming.”

After the envoy had taken leave, the Duke summoned Andrea de Loo, and related to him the conversation which had taken place.  He then, in the presence of that personage, again declared—­upon his honour and with very constant affirmations, that he had never seen nor heard of the book—­the ‘Admonition’ by Cardinal Allen—­and that he knew nothing of any bull, and had no regard to it.’

The plausible Andrew accompanied the Doctor to his lodgings, protesting all the way of his own and his master’s sincerity, and of their unequivocal intentions to conclude a peace.  The next day the Doctor, by agreement, brought a most able protocol of demands in the name of all the commissioners of her Majesty; which able protocol the Duke did not at that moment read, which he assuredly never read subsequently, and which no human soul ever read afterwards.  Let the dust lie upon it, and upon all the vast heaps of protocols raised mountains high during the spring and summer of 1588.

“Dr. Dale has been with me two or three, times,” said Parma, in giving his account of these interviews to Philip.  “I don’t know why he came, but I think he wished to make it appear, by coming to Bruges, that the rupture, when it occurs, was caused by us, not by the English.  He has been complaining of Cardinal Allen’s book, and I told him that I didn’t understand a word of English, and knew nothing whatever of the matter.”

It has been already seen that the Duke had declared, on his word of honour, that he had never heard of the famous pamphlet.  Yet at that very moment letters were lying in his cabinet, received more than a fortnight before from Philip, in which that monarch thanked Alexander for having had the Cardinal’s book translated at Antwerp!  Certainly few English diplomatists could be a match for a Highness so liberal of his word of honour.