Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 11.djvu/74

58 KEIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 63. After receiving their instructions, the forlorn hope of Popery, Parsons, Campian, and seven of their Oxford pupils, now Jesuits like themselves, commenced their journey from Rome on the i8th of April. They were received at Milan with distinguished honours by Carlo Borromeo, who gave them fresh exhortations to con- stancy. They made a second halt at Rheims, where Campian preached a sermon which showed that he had not forgotten his command of English, and threw the college into an ecstasy of enthusiasm. In the beginning of June they went forward again, and at St June. Omers they were met by a warning, that if they valued their lives they would go no further. A number of inflammatory briefs scattered by Sanders about Ireland had been sent over to the English coun- cil ; alarming reports had come in of Spanish prepara- tions ; a declaration of war was not unlikely in return, as will be presently told, for the depredations of Drake ; and one of Sanders's papers declared positively that a Spanish fleet was on the point of sailing for Kerry. Elizabeth showed it to Mendoza, and inquired whether his master had authorized Sanders to use such language. Mendoza' s answer did not mend matters. He declined to say whether assistance would or would not be sent from Spain to Sanders. He looked on the Pope, he said, as undoubtedly God's vicar, and head of the Roman Catholic world. For that confession he would lose a hundred lives if he had them. What his rights were as a temporal prince he did not know ; but this he would say, that the tyranny of the Pope was the eternal sub-