Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 9.djvu/230

216 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 53. men who had been left in Naworth fled like the rest, and, by the afternoon, the castle and its guns were sur- rendered. The victory was complete, but it was one of the many accidents to which Elizabeth was overmuch indebted. Had the battle been lost, as too easily it might have been lost, Lord Hunsdon thought that England would have been lost with it; and, like a man shuddering at the thought of a danger from which he has narrowly escaped, he tried again to force Elizabeth to look her situation in the face, to think less of money and more of the enormous interests which she was im- perilling by her parsimony and vacillations. 1 Elizabeth herself, when the peril was over, admitted that it had been greater than she had supposed. She promised, or Cecil promised for her, that as long as the Earls were in arms in Scotland a larger force should be maintained upon the Borders ; while she herself with her own hand thanked her cousin for his services, and repaid him, not entirely to his own satisfaction, for he never received anything more substantial, with a letter which, if a Sovereign's praise could have filled a lean purse, would have made Hunsdon the richest of the Peers. 1 1 doubt not, my Harry/ she wrote, ' whether that the victory was given me more joyed me, or that you were by God appointed the instrument of my glory. And I assure you that for my country's sake the first might suffice, but for my heart's contentation the second 1 Hunsdon to Cecil, March 3 : MSS. Harder.