On the 26th of the month--and only five days after the communication by
Walsingham just noticed--the Queen was furious that any admission should
have been made to the States of their right to participate with her in
peace-negotiations.

"We find that Sir Thomas Heneage," said she to Leicester, "hath gone
further--in assuring the States that we would make no peace without their
privity and assent--than he had commission; for that our direction was--
if our meaning had been well set down, and not mistaken by our Secretary
--that they should have been only let understand that in any treaty that
might pass between us and Spain, they might be well assured we would have
no less care of their safety than of our own." Secretary Walsingham was
not likely to mistake her Majesty's directions in this or any other
important affair of state. Moreover, it so happened that the Queen had,
in her own letter to Heneage, made the same statement which she now
chose to disavow. She had often a convenient way of making herself
misunderstood, when she thought it desirable to shift responsibility from
her own shoulders upon those of others; but upon this occasion she had
been sufficiently explicit. Nevertheless, a scape-goat was necessary,
and unhappy the subordinate who happened to be within her Majesty's reach
when a vicarious sacrifice was to be made. Sir Francis Walsingham was
not a man to be brow-beaten or hood-winked, but Heneage was doomed to
absorb a fearful amount of royal wrath.

"What phlegmatical reasons soever were made you," wrote the Queen, who
but three weeks before had been so gentle and affectionate to her,
ambassador, "how happeneth it that you will not remember, that when a man
hath faulted and committed by abettors thereto, neither the one nor the
other will willingly make their own retreat. Jesus! what availeth wit,
when it fails the owner at greatest need? Do that you are bidden, and