old nobility who were embribed by grants of church lands, he was indulgent, if not favourable, to the adherents of the ancient religion. The queen, who had bestowed on him the offices and dignities for which he was well fitted, gave him the highest proof of her confidence by appointing him her first commissioner in the tribunal, or rather deputation, who were to hear the arguments of the queen of Scots, as well as of her revolted subjects, and to determine what influence their respective proofs and reasonings should have over the measures of the queen of England. Thus placed at the head of a body, which, in spite of every protestation to the contrary, was to determine between sovereigns and nations, the perils of his slippery eminence were augmented by his compassionate nature and susceptible heart. To enter into the particulars of these conferences would be unseasonable when we are concerned only in their influence, and otherwise needless, because the facts and reasonings then under consideration have already been summarily recounted. A few sentences will be sufficient to render their effects on Norfolk's conduct intelligible. In the conference at York on the affairs of Mary, which met the 4th of October, Norfolk and Sussex were the representatives of Elizabeth; Leslie and Herries were the agents of Mary; and Moray, Lethington, and Buchanan were conspicuous among the deputies of the king and kingdom of Scotland: and it cannot be denied that all of them reflected credit on the governments whom they represented, and on the causes which they espoused. Mary's commissioners complained of facts which were undisputed, the revolt against their royal mistress, her imprisonment, her compulsory resignation, the mockery of placing her infant son on her throne, and her final expulsion from her native realm, which compelled her to seek refuge in the territories of her royal sister. Moray, afraid to disclose his true defence, made a faint and inadequate answer, still professing that his friends had taken up arms only against the murderer of Darnley, who had seized and ravished the queen; that she was confined only for a season for her own safety; that her resignation of the crown was really voluntary ;—in a word, every where substituting forms for facts, and words for things. Mary's reply, as long as the contest remained on this ground, was unanswerable. Moray was thus reduced to the alternative of either acknowledging that he was a rebel and an usurper, or of shutting the door to reconciliation, and cutting off all retreat, by accusing Mary of the most atrocious crimes. As long as he withheld that part of the charge, he considered a compromise with his sister as possible. possible. He persisted in enduring the obloquy of defeat, until he ascertained whether Elizabeth, so long unwilling to support the example of rebellion, would agree to ensure him against the dangerous consequences to himself of his making the accusation, if it should prove to be true. He privately laid before the English commissioners the evidence of her guilt, comprehending the intercepted casket, which contained the love-letters and verses of Mary to Bothwell, and two promises to marry him, of which one was written before his pretended trial, by the hand of the earl of Huntley, still Mary's most powerful and faithful adherent. Norfolk acknowledged that these proofs were unanswerable. Moray's charges and demands were laid by Elizabeth before her privy council, who determined that, till such accusations were answered, it was impossible to receive Mary, or to aid her in remounting the throne. The earl of Lennox now appeared as the avenger of Darnley's blood, and distinctly charged the queen as a principal actor in the murder of her husband. The conferences were adjourned to Hampton Court, without objection on the part of Mary *; the accusations of Moray being communicated to the bishop of Ross and lord Herries, who refused to make any answer, "unless the queen of Scots were allowed to justify herself in the presence of the queen of England, the whole nobility of the kingdom, and the ambassadors October 24, 1568. of foreign states."* This condition must have been known to the proposers to be equivalent to a negative. It was too late, at the very moment when the accusation assumed its most alarming form, to object to a mode of proceeding in which they had acquiesced while the charges were comparatively trivial. They well knew that the exculpation of Mary from the charge of murder had, from the beginning, been declared to be a preliminary condition to her admission to the presence of Elizabeth. They could not have been ignorant that a numerous assembly, such as that to which they appealed, was in itself not the fittest instrument for extracting truth out of intricate circumstances, even if it had been possible for Elizabeth to stake all the interests of her crown and people on the issue of the harangues of a single day. "Had the objections to the documentary proof against Mary," says one of the greatest of historians, "been ever so specious, they cannot now be hearkened to; since Mary, when she could have been fully cleared, did in effect ratify the evidence against her, by recoiling from enquiry at the critical moment."+ During the progress of this investigation the ambition of Norfolk was awakened, and perhaps his pity, if not his tenderness, touched, by the prospect of a marriage with the queen of Scots. Commiseration, the restraint of nature on absolute power, -began then to act on behalf of that princess with a force which has not been spent in three centuries; and if it was aided in the bosom of the duke of Norfolk by the renown of beauty and by the lustre of crowns, he will not on that account be severely blamed by those who look with some indulgence on the last infirmities of noble minds. Moray encouraged his hopes during the conference at York, as he himself alleged, because he did not know that it was displeasing to Elizabeth; but probably still more because he thought that such a marriage might, with due secu * Anderson, Collect. iii. 31. Leslie's Negotiations. rities, compose the disorders of Scotland.* The consent of the kings of France and Spain to the marriage was secretly obtained; and the duke of Alva urged the necessity of amicable agreement with England. On the approach of the northern revolt, in 1569, Elizabeth became more alarmed at the projects ascribed to Norfolk. That nobleman had, with his colleagues at York, manifested the utmost horror at the contents of the intercepted casket, and intimated, as strongly as deference to the judgment of their mistress would allow, their belief that the papers were genuine. He even privately owned to Leslie that "he bare a good will towards the queen of Scots, but that he had seen the letters which Moray had to produce against the queen, by which such facts would be proved as would dishonour her for ever.' "§ Elizabeth, strongly suspecting that Norfolk had fallen into the snares laid by Mary's partisans, expostulated with him on the dangerous councils to which he seemed to lean. "Bethink yourself," said she, " of the pillow on which you are about to lay your head." || He answered: -"I will never marry a person with whom I could not be sure of my pillow." The words of Elizabeth conveyed a bitter sarcasm against the queen of Scots, and were perhaps meant also as a covert menace to the duke; but they seem to have proceeded from rough friendship for him. His adoption of so terrible an imputation thrown upon the princess to whose hand he aspired, though on all suppositions inconsistent with * "Moray affirmed that marriage to be most commodious to the weal and honourable contentation of both queens, and to the common quiet of the two realms; trusting that the queen of England would like it well, as the duke and her subject would govern the queen and realm of Scotland to her devotion."- Leslie's Account of his Negotiations in England, in Anderson's Collection, iii. 37. + Ibid. 63. "They showed us one long and horrible letter of her own hand, as they say, containing foul matter, abominable to be thought of. The letters discourse of some things which were unknown to any other than herself and Bothwell; and as it is hard to counterfeit so many, so the matter of them, and the manner in which these men came by them, are such that as it seemeth that God, in whose sight murder is abominable, would not permit the same to be hid or concealed."- Letter of Norfolk and the other Commissioners to the Queen. York, Oct. 11. 1568. And. vol. iv. part 2. p. 58. Confession of bishop Leslie in the Tower. Murdin, 53. Cambd. i. 188." Ut caveret an pulvino caput inclinaret."-Haynes. nis high character, would be such a strain of dissimulation, if it were insincere, that Elizabeth was warranted in trusting to its truth.* Norfolk was confined to the Tower on the 9th of October, 1569, where he continued till the 4th of August, 1570, the day following that of the trial of Felton, for posting up the bull of Pius V. to depose Elizabeth; when he was enlarged, to the great joy of all men †, on a written engagement never to take any steps towards the marriage, without the permission of Eliza beth; and he was allowed to return to his own mansion, under the mild custody of Henry Neville. Thirteen months after this deliverance, he was once more committed to the same inauspicious prison, charged not only with his former untried treason, but with a new offence of the same heinous character, in his revival of negotiations with Mary, Philip II., the duke of Alva, and Pius V., for the invasion of England. To form a just estimate of our ancient trials, will be owned, by all who have attempted it, to be no easy undertaking. Our accounts of them are often deficient ; still oftener unsatisfactory, from the popular manner in which they are composed, and their want of the legal phraseology, which, though it perplexes the general reader, yet, by its precision and permanence, enables a lawyer either then or afterwards to make an intelligible translation of it into common speech. To the difficulties arising from these circumstances, it must be added, that the rules of evidence (to say nothing of other principles of law) which were then observed were often diametrically opposite to those now accounted inviolable; our ancestors being sometimes accustomed to jumble together, undiscerningly, all kinds and degrees of proof; while we, rushing to the contrary extreme, by our rigorous maxims have excluded very valuable information. In considering a trial of ancient times, we ought Cecil, Diary, in Murdin, 768. + Quo die Feltonus in judicium vocatus, cum dux Norfolcius ad suas des magnâ cum omnium lætitiâ emittitur, ubi sub libra Henrici Neville custodiâ ageret."- Camd. ii. 216. Probably Sir Henry Neville, afterwards lord Abergavenny |