delay to the ambassadors of Scotland, who have made to her a similar request.' They have declared to this queen, 'that if she will put to death the queen of Scotland, the king, her son, is determined to renounce all the friendship and alliance that he has with England, and to advise with his friends how he shall proceed in her cause; at which she has put herself into a great fury."

The report of the French ambassadors is dated December 18, 1586; on the 19th, queen Mary addressed the following noble letter to Elizabeth:

THE QUEEN OF SCOTS TO QUEEN ELIZABETH.1

"Fotheringaye, December 19th, 1586. “Madame,—Having, with difficulty, obtained leave from those to whom you have committed me, to open to you all I have on my heart, as much for exonerating myself from any ill-will, or desire of committing cruelty, or any act of enmity against those, with whom I am connected in blood, as also, kindly to communicate to you what I thought would serve you, as much for your weal and preservation, as for the maintenance of the peace and repose of this isle, which can only be injured if you reject my advice. You will credit, or disbelieve my discourse, as it seems best to you.

-I am resolved to strengthen myself in Christ Jesus alone, who, to those invoking him with a true heart, never fails in his justice and consolation, especially to those who are bereft of all human aid; such are under his holy protection; to him be the glory! He has equalled my expectation, having given me heart and strength, in spe contra spem (in hope against hope), to endure the unjust calumnies, accusations, and condemnations (of those who have no such jurisdiction over me) with a constant resolution to suffer death, for upholding the obedience and authority of the apostolical Roman-catholic church.

Now, since I have been, on your part, informed of the sentence of your last meeting of parliament, lord Buckhurst and Beale having admonished me to prepare for the end of my long and weary pilgrimage, I beg to return you thanks, on my part, for these happy tidings, and to entreat you to vouchsafe to me certain points for the discharge of my conscience. But since sir A. Paulet has informed me (though falsely), that you had indulged me by having restored to me my almoner and the money that they had taken from me, and that the remainder would follow: for all this, I would willingly return you thanks, and supplicate still further as a last request, which, I have thought, for many rea sons, I ought to ask of you alone, that you will accord this ultimate grace, for which I should not like to be indebted to any other, since I have no hope of finding aught but cruelty from the puritans, who are, at this time, God knows wherefore! the first in authority, and the most bitter against me.

I will accuse no one; may I pardon, with a sincere heart, every one, even as I desire every one may grant forgiveness to me, God the first. But I know that you, more than any one, ought to feel at heart the honour or dishonour of your own blood, and that, moreover, of a queen, and the daughter of a king.

Then, madame, for the sake of that Jesus to whose name all powers bow, I require you to ordain, that when my enemies have slaked their black thirst for my innocent blood, you will permit my poor desolated servants altogether to carry away my corpse, to bury it in holy ground, with the other queens of France, my predecessors, especially near the late queen, my mother; having this in recollection, that in Scotland the bodies of the kings, my predecessors, have been outraged, and the churches profaned and abolished; and that as I shall suffer in Des Mesmes MS., No. 9513, Collection of Original State Letters, Bibliothèque du Roi.

'De Préau; he remained in Fotheringaye, but was forbidden to see his royal mistress.

'With no little grandeur of soul, Mary treats Elizabeth, not as her murderess, but as a person controlled by a dominant faction.

this country, I shall not be given place near the kings, your predecessors,' who are mine as well as yours: for, according to our religion, we think much of being interred in holy earth. As they tell me that you will in nothing force my conscience nor my religion, and have even conceded me a priest, refuse me not this my last request, that you will permit me free sepulchre to this body when the soul is separated, which, when united, could never obtain liberty to live in repose, such as you would procure for yourself,- against which repose, before God I speak, I never aimed a blow; but God will let you see the truth of all after my death.

"And because I dread the tyranny of those to whose power you have abandoned me, I entreat you not to permit that execution be done on me without your own knowledge, not for fear of the torment, which I am most ready to suffer, but on account of the reports which will be raised concerning my death, without other witnesses than those who would inflict it, who, I am persuaded, would be of very different qualities from those parties whom I require (being my servants) to be spectators and withal witnesses of my end, in the faith of our sacrament, of my Saviour, and in obedience to His church. And after all is over, that they together may carry away my poor corpse (as secretly as you please), and speedily withdraw, without taking with them any of my goods, except those which, in dying, I may leave to them. . . . which are little enough for their long and good services.

“One jewel that I received of you, I shall return to you with my last words, or sooner if you please.

"Once more I supplicate you to permit me to send a jewel and a last adieu to my son, with my dying benediction, for of my blessing he has been deprived, since you sent me his refusal to enter into the treaty whence I was excluded by his wicked council; this last point I refer to your favourable consideration and conscience, as the others; but I ask them, in the name of Jesus Christ, and in respect of our consanguinity, and for the sake of king Henry VII., your grandfather and mine, and by the honour of the dignity we both held, and of our sex in common, do I implore you to grant these requests.

"As to the rest, I think you know that in your name they have taken down my dais, (canopy and raised seat,) but afterwards they owned to me that it was not by your commandment, but by the intimation of some of your privy council; 1 thank God that this wickedness came not from you, and that it serves rather to vent their malice than to afflict me, having made up my mind to die. It is on account of this, and some other things, that they debarred me from writing to you, and after they had done all in their power to degrade me from my rank, they told me, that I was but a mere dead woman, incapable of dignity. God be praised for all!

"I would wish that all my papers were brought to you without reserve, that, at last, it may be manifest to you, that the sole care of your safety was not confined to those who are so prompt to persecute me; if you will accord this my

This implied wish of burial in Westminster Abbey, her son James afterwards observed.

In this she was deceived; her chaplain was not suffered to see her, though in the castle.

'She here dreads the imputation of suicide, a crime which is considered with peculiar horror by Catholics, as rendering impossible the rites their creed deems it essential that the dying should receive.

This was probably the diamond ring which Elizabeth sent her, as a token of amity. "It was," says Melville, "an English custom to give a diamond, to be returned at a time of distress, to recal friendship." The description of this ce lebrated ring is curious. Two diamonds were set in two rings, and, when laid together, formed the shape of a heart. Elizabeth sent one to Mary, and kept the other. Thoms' Traditions.

last request, I would wish that you would write for them, otherwise they do with them as they choose. And, moreover, I wish that, to this my last request, you will let me know your last reply.

To conclude, I pray God, the just judge, of his mercy, that he will enlighten you with his Holy Spirit, and that he will give me his grace to die in the perfect charity I am disposed to do, and to pardon all those who have caused, or who have co-operated in my death. Such will be my last prayer to my end, which, I esteem myself happy, will precede the persecution which, I foresee, menaces this isle, where God is no longer seriously feared and revered, but vanity and worldly policy rule and govern all-yet will I accuse no one, nor give way to presumption—yet, while abandoning this world and preparing my. self for a better, I must remind you, that one day you will have to answer for your charge, and for all those whom you doom, and that I desire that my blood and my country may be remembered in that time. For why? From the first days of our capacity to comprehend our duties, we ought to bend our minds to make the things of this world yield to those of eternity!

"From Forteringhay (Fotheringay), this 19th December, 1586.

"Your sister and cousin,
"Prisoner wrongfully,

"MARIE (ROTNE.')"

The effect produced by this touching, but dignified appeal to the conscience of Elizabeth, is rather hinted at than described by the pitiless satrap, Leicester, in one of his pithy letters to Walsingham. "There is a letter from the Scottish queen," writes he, "that hath wrought tears, but, I trust, shall do no further herein; albeit, the delay is too dangerous." 2

Who can read this remark without perceiving the fact that, in this instance, as well as in the tragedy of her maternal kinsman, the duke of Norfolk, Elizabeth's relentings were overruled, and her female heart steeled against the natural impulses of mercy by the ruthless men whose counsels influenced her resolves? Had Elizabeth exercised her own unbiassed judgment, and yielded to the angel-whisperings of woman's gentler nature, which disposed her to draw back from affixing her signature to the fatal warrant, her annals would have remained unsullied by a crime, which can neither be justified on moral nor political grounds.

Rapin, with sophistry unworthy of an historian, says "The queen of Scots and her friends had brought matters to such a pass, that one of the queens must perish, and it was natural that the weakest should fall." This was decidedly untrue. The royal authority of Elizabeth was never more firmly established than at this very period. She could have nothing to apprehend from the sick, helpless, and impoverished captive of Fotheringaye. It was to the ministers of Elizabeth and their party that Mary was an object of alarm; consequently, it was their interest to keep the mind of their royal mistress in a constant state of

1 The original of this letter is in very obsolete French, of which a copy may be seen in the Bridgewater edition of the Egerton papers. A fragment of the same, copied in a very beautiful hand, is also preserved in the State Paper Office, in the voluminous collection connected with the personal history of Mary, queen of Scots; an abridged translation has been published by Mr. Tytler, in the eighth volume of his valuable history of Scotland.

'Harleian MS., 285; British Museum.

excitement, by plots and rumours of plots, till they had wrought her irritable temper up to the proper pitch. Among the many means resorted to for that purpose by Burleigh, may, in all probability, be reckoned the celebrated letter, which has been published in Murdin's State Papers as the production of Mary, queen of Scots, in whose name it was written, but which bears every mark of the grossest forgery. It is written in French,' and details, with provoking minuteness, a variety of scandals, which appear to have been in circulation against queen Elizapeth in her own court. These are affirmed to have been repeated to the captive queen by the countess of Shrewsbury, who, during the life of her first husband, Mr. Saintlow, was one of Elizabeth's bed-chamber women. Lady Shrewsbury was a malignant gossip and intriguante, and on very ill terms with her husband's royal charge. These circumstances give some plausibility to the idea that Mary wrote this letter, in order to destroy her great enemy's credit with the queen.

Mary had made, at various times, very serious complaints of the insolence of this vulgar-minded woman, and of the aspersions which she had cast on her own character; and she had also requested the French ambassador to inform queen Elizabeth of her treasonable intrigues in favour of her little grand-daughter, lady Arabella Stuart; but that Mary ever departed so far from the character of a gentlewoman, as to commit to paper the things contained in this document, no one who is familiar with the pure and delicate style which forms the prevailing charm of her authentic letters can believe. Neither was Mary so deplorably ignorant of the human heart, as not to be aware that the person who has so little courtesy as to repeat to another painful and degrading reports, becomes invariably an object of greater dislike to that person than the originator of the scandal.

Every sentence of the letter has been artfully devised, for the express purpose of irritating Elizabeth, not only against lady Shrewsbury, but against Mary herself, who would never have had the folly to inform her jealous rival" that lady Shrewsbury had, by a book of divination in her possession, predicted that Elizabeth would very soon be cut off by a violent death, and Mary would succeed to her throne." What was this but furnishing Elizabeth with a cogent reason for putting her to death without further delay? The letter, as a whole, will not bear insertion; it contains very offensive observations on Elizabeth's person, constitution, and conduct, which are there affirmed to have been made by lady Shrewsbury, together with a repetition of much indelicate gossip, touching her majesty's intimacy with Simier, the plenipotentiary of Francis duke of Anjou, with Anjou himself, and with Hatton; but strange to say, not a word about Leicester, which is the more worthy of remark, inasmuch as the scandals respecting Elizabeth and Leicester had been very notorious, however devoid of foundation they might have been in point of fact.

Leicester was justly regarded by Mary, queen of Scots, as one of her 'But not in Mary's well-known hand: no copy of the letter exists in her writ ing. The story relating to the discovery of this letter is extremely absurd. 'Murdin's State Papers, p. 558.

greatest enemies. He is always mentioned with peculiar bitterness in her letters to her friends, and if the celebrated scandal letter, in Murdin, had really been written by her, she would scarcely have omitted having a fling at him. Instead of this, the great stress is laid against Leicester's personal rival, Hatton, who is provokingly stated "to have been, at times, so thoroughly ashamed of the public demonstrations of her majesty's fondness, that he was constrained to retire." Some allusion is also made to a love-quarrel between Elizabeth and Hatton, about certain gold buttons on his dress, on which occasion he departed out of her presence, in a fit of choler; that she sent Killigrew after him, in great haste, and bestowed a buffet on her messenger when he came back without him, and that she pensioned another gentleman, with three hundred a year, for bringing her news of Hatton's return; that when the said Hatton might have contracted an illustrious marriage, he dared not, for fear of offending her; and, for the same cause, the earl of Oxford was afraid of appearing on good terms with his wife; that lady Shrewsbury had advised her (the queen of Scots), laughing excessively at the same time, to place her son in the list of her majesty's lovers, for she was so vain, and had so high an opinion of her own beauty, that she fancied herself into some heavenly goddess, and, if she took it into her head, might easily be persuaded to entertain the youthful king of Scots as one of her suitors; that no flattery was too absurd for her to receive, for those about her were accustomed to tell her, "that they could not look full upon her, because her face was as resplendent as the sun;" and that the countess of Shrewsbury declared," that she and lady Lenox never dared look at each other, for fear of bursting out a laughing, when in Elizabeth's presence, because of her affectation," adding, "that nothing in the world would induce her daughter, Talbot, to hold any office near her majesty's person, for fear she should, in one of her furies, treat her as she had done her cousin Scudamore, whose finger she had broken, and then tried to make her courtiers believe that it was done by the fall of a chandelier; that she had cut another of her attendants across the hand with a knife, and that her ladies were accustomed to mimic and take the queen off, for the amusement of their waiting-women; and, above all, that lady Shrewsbury had asserted, "that the queen's last illness proceeded from an attempt to heal the disease in her leg,"1 with many other remarks equally vexatious.

If Elizabeth really believed this letter to have been written by Mary, it is impossible to wonder at the animosity she evinced against her, since the details it contained were such as few women could forgive another for repeating.

The young king of Scotland addressed a letter, of earnest and indignant remonstrance, to Elizabeth, on the subject of his unfortunate mother, and directed sir William Keith, his ambassador, to unite with the French ambassador in all the efforts he made for averting the doom that was now impending over her. Elizabeth long delayed an audience to Keith, and when she did admit him to her presence, she behaved with

'Murdin's State Papers, p. 558.