Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 10.djvu/224

 204 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 58. conscious, at all events, that if the French did come the consequences might be irreparable, Elizabeth now agreed to do what Sussex had urged upon her after the rebellion of Yorkshire, and which, had she done it then, would have saved Scotland all its misery. To this it had come at last ; and the shuffling, and the falsehood, and the broken promises had been thrown away. A few plain words would have sufficed then to annihilate the hopes of the party of the Queen of Scots, which Eliza- beth herself had created and had kept alive by her un- certainty. She had encouraged them to take arms ; she had led them to believe that in heart she was on the Queen of Scots' side ; and in the end, after two Regents had been murdered, and her true friends brought to the edge of ruin, after having brought her own throne in danger, and imperilled the very Reformation itself, her diplomacy broke down, and she was obliged to trample out the sparks with her own feet which she and only she had kindled. The necessary orders went down to Berwick. Heavy siege guns ' her Majesty's peace-makers/ as Sir Thomas Smith called them were sent round to Leith. Drury, who was to conduct the siege, went forward with a party of pioneers to determine the position of the batteries, and five hundred Scotch labourers were set to work at the trenches. Edinburgh Castle stands on the extreme end of a long ridge of rock, which rising gradually for three quarters of a mile terminates in a broken area several acres in extent, connected with the ascending slope by a narrow