Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 11.djvu/196

 i So REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 64. discovered by Parma. The governor, uneasy for the fate of his child, sent word to the English council, and one evening when Don Bernardino was at supper with the French ambassador, a party of men in the employ of Walsingham entered Mendoza' s house and carried him off. Mendoza was furious ; the law of nations had been broken, he said. An ambassador's house was a sanc- tuary, and the boy was a Spanish subject ; he demanded the instant restitution of his prisoner, and the execution of the instruments of the outrage. Except for Philip's strict injunctions to him to avoid a rupture, he de- clared that he would have applied for his passports. 1 A worse offence threatened to follow. The Azores had been less submissive to the Spanish conquest than the mother country. Terceira declared for Don Antonio, and Terceira, if there was to be war with Spain, was the best imaginable position from which to intercept the gold fleets on their way from Panama to Cadiz. Don Anto- nio's agents had been busy in London and Paris, and Catherine de Medici wished the island to be immediately occupied by a united expedition from England and France. Elizabeth, refusing to commit herself openly, half consented to allow Drake and Hawkins to go with the French as privateers under the flag of Don Antonio. Sir James Crofts at the beginning of June gave inform- ation to Mendoza that a squadron was in preparation, among others a very fine vessel of 500 tons, which the ambassador innocently said that the governor of Cadiz 1 Castelnau au Hoy, Juin 20 : TEULET, vol. iii. Mendoza a su Mag d , 24 Junio, 1581 : MSS. Simaneas.