Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 9.djvu/252

 238 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 54. not mean to interfere, and Catherine afterwards in private spoke even with greater friendliness. 'The unaccustomed smooth speech/ the change of note so sudden and so entire, led Norris ' to suspect false dealing/ The English Government were not lulled into security, but continued their preparations for de- fence, while the Protestant congregations raised sub- scriptions to support the Huguenots. Large sums of money continued to be sent to the Admiral, the pri- vateer fleets were let out again, and the English ports were reopened to the Eochelle cruisers. Coligny, who had been wounded at Moncoutour, was once more in the field at the head of an army, and whether the Court was sincere or not in its present moderation, Elizabeth was able to feel that from France, while its present mood lasted, she had nothing to fear, although that mood would probably continue until it had been seen whether, through the death of Murray, the French party would recover their ascendency in Scotland. There it was that she found her chief ground for un- easiness, and the necessity, or what appeared to her a necessity, for an evasive and shuffling policy. The natural, and at first sight the most prudent, course for her would have been to declare for the young King, to acknowledge, once for all, that the Queen of Scots had los y, her crown by her own fault, and to refuse to allow the question of restoration to be any more reopened. But in doing this she must have been prepared either, as she had proposed in the autumn, to replace the Queen of Scots as a prisoner into the hands of the