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 people rallied to this Church, and Parliament was able to pass stronger and stronger laws against those who refused to conform to it, whether Catholics or Puritans.

All her reign, but especially for the first twenty-eight years of it, the Queen was in constant danger of being murdered by some extreme Catholic agent of the Pope. Such men called her ‘heretic’, ‘bastard’, ‘usurper’ and other ugly names. There was plot after plot, and the Catholics, perhaps not unnaturally, considered the traitors who were executed for these plots to be martyrs, not murderers. But, as each plot failed, the main result was to drive all moderate Catholics into the English Church; for most of them, much as they had deplored the ‘heresy’ of their Queen, were patriots at heart.

Elizabeth hated war, partly because she had a shrewd idea that England was hardly strong or rich enough to engage in a great foreign war, but still more because she simply couldn't bear to pay her soldiers and sailors. In fact, she expected her subjects to fight her battles for her by taking service with rebellious Scottish, French or Spanish subjects, while she pretended to be at peace with the sovereigns of those countries. But she was often obliged to send small, and almost secret expeditions to help these rebels. Philip of Spain, for instance, was engaged in a long and desperate attempt to suppress Protestantism in the ‘Low Countries’ (the modern Belgium and Holland), and our Queen was constantly sending aid to the Protestants there, though never openly till 1585, by which time the ‘Dutch Republic’ had been born there, and had become the most valuable ally of England. It was the same story in France, where a strong Protestant party, continually fed by