For two months after that scene at
Fotheringay she had refused to see Burghley, and would consult no one
but Sir James Crofts and her Spanish-tempered ladies. She knew that
Spain now intended that she should betray the towns in the Low
Countries, yet she was blind to the infamy which it would bring upon
her. She left her troops there without their wages to shiver into
mutiny. She named commissioners, with Sir James Crofts at their head, to
go to Ostend and treat with Parma, and if she had not resolved on an act
of treachery she at least played with the temptation, and persuaded
herself that if she chose to make over the towns to Philip, she would be
only restoring them to their lawful owner.
Burghley and Walsingham, you can see from their letters, believed now
that Elizabeth had ruined herself at last. Happily her moods were
variable as the weather. She was forced to see the condition to which
she had reduced her affairs in the Low Countries by the appearance of a
number of starving wretches who had deserted from the garrisons there
and had come across to clamour for their pay at her own palace gates. If
she had no troops in the field but a mutinous and starving rabble, she
might get no terms at all.
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