{59} At His Return He
Was Taken Principal Secretary, And For One Of The Great Engines Of
State, And Of The Times, High In His Mistress's (The Queen's)
Favour, And A Watchful Servant Over The Safety Of His Mistress.
They note him to have certain courtesies and secret ways of
intelligence above the rest; but I must confess
I am to seek
wherefore he suffered Parry {60} to play so long as he did, hang on
the hook, before he hoisted him up; and I have been a little curious
in the search thereof, though I have not to do with the ARCANA
REGALIA IMPERII, for to know it is sometimes a burden; and I
remember it was Ovid's criminant error that he saw too much, but I
hope these are collaterals, and of no danger.
But that Parry, having an intent to kill the Queen, made the way of
his access by betraying of others, and in impeaching of the priests
of his own correspondency, and thereby had access to confer with the
Queen, as oftentimes private and familiar discourse with Walsingham,
will not be the query of the mystery, for the Secretary might have
had an end of a further discovery and maturity of the treason; but
that, after the Queen knew Parry's intent, why she would then admit
him to private discourse, and Walsingham to suffer him, considering
the conditions of all the designs, and to permit him to go where and
whither he listed, and only under the secrecy of a dark sentinel set
over him, was a piece of reach and hazard beyond my apprehension. I
must again profess that I have read many of his letters, for they
are commonly sent to my Lord of Leicester and of Burleigh out of
France, containing many fine passages and secrets, yet, if I might
have been beholding to his cyphers, they would have told pretty
tales of the times; but I must now close him up, and rank him
amongst the TOGATI, yet chief of those that laid the foundations of
the French and Dutch wars, which was another piece of his fineness
of the times, with one observation more, that he was one of the
greatest always of the Austrian embracements, for both himself and
Stafford that preceded him might well have been compared to him in
the Gospel that sowed his tares in the night; so did they their
seeds in division in the dark; and as it is a likely report that
they father on him at his return, the Queen speaking to him with
some sensibility of the Spanish designs on France: "Madam," he
answered, "I beseech you be content, and fear not; the Spaniard hath
a great appetite and an excellent digestion, but I have fitted him
with a bone for these twenty years that your Majesty should have no
cause to doubt him, provided that, if the fire chance to slake which
I have kindled, you will be ruled by me, and cast in some of your
fuel, which will revive the flame."
WILLOUGHBY.
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