[320] Spanish State Papers, Elizabeth.
[321] Spanish State Papers, Elizabeth.
[322] The whole of the documents are at Hatfield; most of them in extenso in Haynes.
[323] See Morton to Cecil, 9th February 1571 (Hatfield Papers, part i., 1541); and Elizabeth to Shrewsbury, 24th March (ibid., 1546).
[324] Correspondance de la Mothe Fénélon.
[325] Walsingham Papers. Most of the letters in extenso in “The Compleat Ambassador.”
[326] There are in the Foreign State Papers of the year several of Cecil’s balancing considerations of the advantages and disadvantages of the match. From them it is clear that the Secretary himself was uncertain of the Queen’s intentions. In one important letter to her (31st August), Cecil suggests a way by which she may extricate herself, if she pleases, from the agreement she had made on the matter with Catharine’s special envoy, De Foix, at Knebworth. But he warns her very seriously of the dangerous position in which she stands unless she does marry. “It will,” he says, “also be necessary to seek by your Majesty’s best council the means to preserve yourself, as in the most dangerous and desperate sicknesses, the help of the best physicians; and surely how your Majesty shall obtain remedies for your perils, I think, is only in the knowledge of Almighty God.”
[327] Norris to the Queen (Foreign State Papers), 31st August 1570; also Warcop’s communications from Walsingham to Cecil, 16th July 1571, &c.
[328] Walsingham Papers.
[329] His eldest son Thomas, afterwards Lord Exeter, also sat in this Parliament as representative of the borough of Stamford. He had ended the sowing of his wild oats, to which reference has been made, by running away with a nun from a French convent; and was now married to Dorothy Nevil, a daughter of the last Lord Latimer, whose sister had married Sir Henry Percy, brother of the rebel Earl of Northumberland. Lord Burghley, in the little Perpetual Calendar at Hatfield, duly records the birth of all of Thomas’s children, three of whom had been born by this time.