Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 9.djvu/362

 348 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 55. administration of it ; yet, but for the statesmen to whom they refused to listen, and the Puritans whom they en- deavoured to destroy, the old religion would have come back on the country like a returning tide. The Puritans would have furnished new martyrs ; the statesmen, through good and evil, would have watched over liberty : but the High Church clergy would have slunk back into conformity, or dwindled to their proper insig- nificance. The country knew its interests, and their high-handed intolerance had to wait till more quiet times ; but they came back to power when the chances of a Catholic revolution were buried in the wreck of the Armada ; and they remained supreme till they had once more wearied the world with them, and brought a king and an archbishop to the scaffold. These petty troubles, however, fertile as they were of mischief in the future, were of small importance by the side of the immediate pressing perils. Nestled in the heart of England lay the bosom serpent, as "Walsingham called the Queen of Scots, with the longing eyes of the English nobles fastened upon her as their coming de- liverer. There she lay deserving, if crime coulddeserve, the highest gallows on which ever murderer swung, yet guarded by the mystic sanctity of her birth-claim to the crown. Cecil has not left on record the impression which Mary Stuart made upon him when he saw for the first time the object of so many years' anxiety. It was not then as when, seventeen years later, those two once more encountered each other, when compromise was