Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 7.djvu/346

 326 REIGN OF ELIZABETH [en. 44. last to fulfil in earnest the hopes which she had excited. It would have come to an end long before had it not been that Philip, who was irresolute as herself, allowed his wishes for the marriage to delude him into believing Elizabeth serious whenever it was mentioned ; while the desirableness of the Austrian alliance in itself, and the extreme anxiety for it among English statesmen, kept alive the jealous fears of the French. To de Silva the Queen appeared a vain, capricious woman, whose plea- sure it was to see the princes of Europe successively at her feet ; yet he too had expected that if her Scotch policy failed she would take the Archduke in earnest at last, and thus the value of the move was not yet wholly played away, and she could use his name once more to hold her friends nrd her party together. As a matter of course, when the Archduke was talked of on one side the French had their candidate on the other ; and Charles the Ninth being no longer in ques- tion, Paul de Foix threw his interest on the side of Lei- cester. While the Queen of Scots was displaying the spirit of a sovereign and accomplishing with uncommon skill the first steps of the Catholic revolution, Elizabeth was amusing herself once more with balancing the attrac- tions of her lover and the Austrian prince : not indeed that she any longer wished to marry even the favoured LorTOlobert ; ' If she ever took a husband/ she said to de Foix, * she would give him neither a share of her power nor the keys of her treasury ; her subjects wanted a successor, and she would use the husband's services to obtain such a thing ; but under any aspect the thought