1587, the year of expectation and preparation, that the materials were
slowly combining out of which that year's history was to be formed.

And there sat the patient letter-writer in his cabinet, busy with his
schemes. His grey head was whitening fast. He was sixty years of age.
His frame was slight, his figure stooping, his digestion very weak, his
manner more glacial and sepulchral than ever; but if there were a hard-
working man in Europe, that man was Philip II. And there he sat at his
table, scrawling his apostilles. The fine innumerable threads which
stretched across the surface of Christendom, and covered it as with a
net, all converged in that silent cheerless cell. France was kept in a
state of perpetual civil war; the Netherlands had been converted into a
shambles; Ireland was maintained in a state of chronic rebellion;
Scotland was torn with internal feuds, regularly organized and paid for
by Philip; and its young monarch--"that lying King of Scots," as
Leicester called him--was kept in a leash ready to be slipped upon
England, when his master should give the word; and England herself was
palpitating with the daily expectation of seeing a disciplined horde of
brigands let loose upon her shores; and all this misery, past, present,
and future, was almost wholly due to the exertions of that grey-haired
letter-writer at his peaceful library-table.

At the very beginning of the year the King of Denmark had made an offer
to Philip of mediation. The letter, entrusted to a young Count de
Rantzan, had been intercepted by the States--the envoy not having availed
himself, in time, of his diplomatic capacity, and having in consequence
been treated, for a moment, like a prisoner of war. The States had
immediately addressed earnest letters of protest to Queen Elizabeth,
declaring that nothing which the enemy could do in war was half so
horrible to them as the mere mention of peace. Life, honour, religion,