Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/482

462 blockade complete, the French King withdrew for a few months, well assured that, with the approaching spring, Boulogne must inevitably be his. Bullenberg cut the garrison off from the Boulonnaise. Their cattle were gone. They had neither wood nor turf for fuel, nor means of obtaining it. The entire population of the town depended on England for its daily supplies, which the Ambletue galleys were ever on the watch to seize. The English council could not disguise from themselves the nature of the situation. On their part they could only reply with a formal declaration of war. Their spirit had not sunk to a tacit endurance of invasion under the name of peace; they recalled their ambassadors; and, for 'their late manifold injuries, and also for that, contrary to honour, faith, and godliness, the French King had taken away the young Scottish Queen, the King's Majesty's espouse, by which marriage the realms of England and Scotland should have been united in perpetual peace,' 'they did intimate and declare him and all his subjects to be enemies of the King's Majesty of England.'

Such was the result of an administration of something less than three years by the Duke of Somerset. He had found the country at peace, recruiting itself after a long and exhausting war. The struggle which he had reopened had cost, with the commotions of the summer, almost a million and a half, when the regular revenue was but 300,000l., and of that sum a third was