Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/394

374 The Queen indignantly demanded explanations of Noailles, and, through her ambassador at Paris, she required the French Government to seize 'her traitors,' and deliver them to her. Noailles, alarmed, perhaps, for his own security, suggested that it might be well to conceal Carew, and to affect to make an attempt to arrest him. But Henry, at once more sagacious and more bold, replied to the ambassador that 'he was not the Queen's hangman:' 'these men that you require,' he said, 'deny that they have conspired anything against the Queen; marry, they say they will not be oppressed by mine enemy, and that is no just cause why I should owe them ill-will.' He desired Noailles, with quiet irony, to tell her Majesty 'that there was nothing in the existing treaties to forbid his accepting the services of English volunteers in the war with the Emperor: her Majesty might remember that he had invited her to make a new treaty, and that she had refused:' 'he would act by the just letter of his obligations.'

Would her subjects have permitted, the Queen would have replied by a declaration of war. As it was, she could only relieve herself with indignant words.