"If the law punish one who is guilty, he must submit to justice; if one who is innocent, he must submit to fortune."
I do not find one single address from either House of Parliament, advising queen Elizabeth to vest her captain general in the Low Countries with more power. On the contrary, it is recorded to her lasting honour, That she wrote to him, "to allay his aspirings; that she admired how a man whom she had raised out of the dust should so contemptuously violate her commands;" desiring the States to devest him of that absolute authority, to which she had set such bounds as he should not pass.
When this prudent queen had demanded and obtained from the Dutch the town of Flushing, castle of Ramekins, and the isle of Brill, to be surrendered to her as cautionary for repayment of the sums she might expend in their service; I do not find any Englishman at that time pleading the cause of the distressed provinces (which then indeed was allowed to be a proper style), complaining of the narrowness of their frontier, and remonstrating against this as a hard bargain: nor do I remember that her successor was thanked by the nation for giving up those cautionary towns, which she thought as safe in her own hands as in those of the best of her allies[1].
This excellent queen was sometimes, indeed, attacked with pamphlets; particularly by one, entitled "The Gulf wherein England will be swallowed by the French Marriage:" for which, Stubs[2] and
- ↑ This transaction is related very circumstantially in Howell's Letters, p. 32.
- ↑ John Stubs, of Lincoln's Inn, gent., a most rigid puritan, author of "A Discovery of a gaping Gulf for England by
