But Carew and his friends might depend on support so long as they would make themselves useful to France. Possessed of ships and arms, they were a constant menace to the Channel, and a constant temptation to the disaffected; and, growing bitter at last, and believing that Elizabeth's life was on the point of being sacrificed, they were prepared to support Henry in a second attempt to seize the Isle of Wight, and to accept the French competitor for the English crown in the person of the Queen of Scots.[1] Thus fatally the friends of the Reformation played into the hands of its enemies. By the solid mass of Englishmen the armed interference of France was more dreaded than even a Spanish sovereign; and the heresy became doubly odious which was tampering with the hereditary enemies of the realm. In London only the revolutionary spirit continued vigorous, and broke out perpetually in unexpected forms. At the beginning of March three hundred schoolboys met in a meadow outside the city walls: half were for Wyatt and for France, half for the Prince of Spain; and, not
- ↑ On the 29th of April Wotton wrote in a cypher to Mary; 'Towards the end of the summer the French King, by Peter Carew's provocation, intendeth to land the rebels, with a number of Scots, in Essex, and in the Isle of Wight, where they mean to land easily, and either go on, if any number of Englishmen resort unto them, as they say many will, or else fortify themselves there. They council the French King to make war against your Highness in the right and title of the young Queen of Scots.'—MS. Ibid.
and being those arrant traitors ao entertained there as they be, she could not have found in her heart to have used, in like matter, the semblable part towards his master for the gain of two realms, arid with those words she departed.'—Gardiner to Wotton: French MSS. bundle xi.
