words::- "You shall go when I send you. In the meantime, see that you lodge in the court, where you may follow your books, read, and discourse of the wars."

Christopher Blount, undoubtedly a near relation of the highly honoured courtier, Charles, was the person employed by Elizabeth as a spy upon Leicester's proceedings in the Low Countries. Both the French ambassador and Morgan, in their private letters to the captive queen of Scots, suggest the expediency of endeavouring to win him over to her interest, as a person likely to afford very important information to her friends as to the affairs of England. Yet any one possessed of the slightest reflection, would be apt to imagine, that the very attempt to tamper with a person so connected, would be dangerous in the extreme, and only likely to end in betraying their political secrets to Elizabeth.

The course of chronology now brings us to the darkest and most painful epoch of the maiden reign, the death of Elizabeth's hapless kinswoman, Mary queen of Scots.

The implacable junta by whom Elizabeth's resolves were at times influenced, and her better feelings smothered, had sinned too deeply against Mary Stuart, to risk the possibility of her surviving their royal mistress. Elizabeth shrank from either incurring the odium, or establishing the dangerous precedent, of bringing a sovereign princess to the block. The queens, whose blood had been shed on the scaffold by her ruthless father, were subjects of his own, puppets whom he had raised, and then degraded from the fatal dignity which his own caprice had bestowed upon them; but even he, tyrant as he was, had not ventured to slay either of his royally-born consorts, Katharine of Arragon, or Anne of Cleves, though claiming the twofold authority of husband and sovereign over both.

Mary Stuart was not only a king's daughter, but a crowned and anointed sovereign; and under no pretence, could she legally be rendered amenable to Elizabeth's

1 Blount, afterwards, became fatally enamoured of the fair and frail sister of his old adversary, Essex, the beautiful Penelope, whose affection he had won before she was linked in a joyless wedlock with Robert, lord Rich. They finally engaged in an illicit passion; and, after much guilt and sorrow, were united in marriage, when lady Rich was repudiated by her injured husband; but Blount, who had succeeded to his brother's title, died the following year, 1606, of the sorrow his self-indulgence had sown for him, a mournful sequel to the bright beginning of his fortunes.

authority. Every species of quiet cruelty that might tend to sap the life of a delicately-organized and sensitive female, had been systematically practised on the royal captive by the leaders of Elizabeth's cabinet. Mary had been confined in damp, dilapidated apartments, exposed to malaria, deprived of exercise and recreation, and compelled, occasionally, by way of variety, to rise from a sick bed, and travel through an inclement country, from one prison to another, in the depth of winter.' These atrocities had entailed upon her a complication of chronic maladies of the most agonizing description, but she continued to exist, and it was evident that the vital principle in her constitution, was sufficiently tenacious to enable her to endure many years of suffering. The contingencies of a day, an hour, meantime, might lay Elizabeth in the dust, and call Mary Stuart to the seat of empire. Could Burleigh, Walsingham, and Leicester expect, in that event, to escape the vengeance which their injurious treatment had provoked from that princess?

It is just possible, that Burleigh, rooted as he was to the helm of state, and skilled in every department of government, might, like Talleyrand, have made his defence good, and retained his office at court, if not his personal influence with the sovereign, under any change. He had observed an outward show of civility to Mary, and was suspected, by Walsingham, of having entered into some secret pact with James of Scotland; but Walsingham and Leicester had committed themselves irrevocably, and, for them, there could be no other prospect than the block, if the Scottish queen, who was nine years younger than Elizabeth, outlived her.

From the moment that Elizabeth had declared that "honour and conscience both forbade her to put Mary to death," it had been the great business of these determined foes of Mary, to convince her that it was incompatible with her own safety, to permit her to live. Assertions to this effect, were lightly regarded by Elizabeth, but the evidence of a series of conspiracies, real as well as feigned, began to take effect upon her mind, and slowly, but surely, brought her to the same conclusion.

For many years it had been the practice of Walsingham 1 See Letters of Mary queen of Scots.

to employ spies, not only for the purpose of watching the movements of those who were suspected of attachment to the Scottish queen, but to inveigle them into plots against the government and person of queen Elizabeth. One of these base agents, William Parry, after years of secret treachery in this abhorrent service, became himself a convert to the doctrines of the church of Rome, and conceived a design of assassinating queen Elizabeth. This he communicated to Neville, one of the English exiles, the claimant of the forfeit honours and estates of the last earl of Westmoreland. Neville, in the hope of propitiating the queen, gave prompt information of Parry's intentions against her majesty; but as Parry had formerly denounced Neville, Elizabeth, naturally imagining that he had been making a very bold attempt to draw Neville into an overt act of treason, directed Walsingham to inquire of the spy, whether he had recently, by way of experiment, suggested the idea of taking away her life to any one? If Parry had replied in the affirmative he would have been safe; but the earnest manner of his denial excited suspicion. He and Neville were confronted; and he then avowed "that he had felt so strong an impulse to murder the queen, that he had, of late, always left his dagger at home when summoned to her presence, lest he should fall upon her and slay her." This strange conflict of feeling appears like the reasoning madness of a monomaniac, and suggests the idea that Parry's mind had become affected with the delirious excitement of the times.

He was condemned to death, and on the scaffold cited his royal mistress to the tribunal of the all-seeing Judge, in whose presence he was about to appear."

The unhappy man expressly acquitted the queen of Scots of any knowledge of his designs. Mary herself, in her private letters, denies having the slightest connexion with him. The plot, however, furnished an excuse for treating her with greater cruelty than before. Her comparatively humane keeper, Sir Ralph Sadler, was superseded by Sir Amias Paulet and Sir Drue Drury, two rigid puritans, who were selected by Leicester for the ungracious office of embittering the brief and evil remnant of her days. The last report, made by Sadler, of the state of bodily suf

1 Hamilton's Annals. State Trials.

2 Camden.

fering, to which the royal captive was reduced by her long and rigorous imprisonment, is very pitiable.

"I find her," says he, "much altered from what she was when I was first acquainted with her. She is not yet able to strain her left foot to the ground; and to her very great grief, not without tears, findeth it wasted and shrunk of its natural measure."1 In this deplorable state the hapless invalid was removed to the damp and dilapidated apartments of her former hated gaol, Tutbury Castle. A fresh access of illness was brought on by the inclemency of the situation, and the noxious quality of the air. She wrote a piteous appeal to Elizabeth, who did not vouchsafe a reply. Under these circumstances, the unfortunate captive caught, with feverish eagerness, at every visionary scheme that whispered to her in her doleful prison-house the flattering hope of escape. The zeal and self-devotion of her misjudging friends were the very means used by her foes to effect her destruction. Morgan, her agent in France, to whom allusion has already been made, was a fierce, wrongheaded Welchman, who had persuaded himself, and some others, that it was not only expedient but justifiable to destroy Elizabeth, as the sole means of rescuing his longsuffering mistress from the living death in which she was slowly pining away.

So greatly had Elizabeth's animosity against Morgan been excited, by the disclosures of Parry, that she declared "that she would give ten thousand pounds for his head." When she sent the order of the Garter to Henry III. she demanded that Morgan should be given up to her vengeance. Henry, who was doubtless aware that many disclosures might be forced from Morgan on the rack, that would have the effect of committing himself with his good sister of England, endeavoured to satisfy her by sending Morgan to the Bastile, and forwarding his papers, or rather, it may be surmised, a discreet selection from them, to Elizabeth. But though the person of this restless intriguer was detained in prison, his friends were permitted to have access to him; and his plotting brain was employed in the organization of a more daring design against the life of queen Elizabeth than any that had yet been devised.

1 Sadler Papers, 460.

2 See Letters of Mary queen of Scots.

Mary's faithful ambassador at Paris, Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow, and her kinsmen of the house of Guise, decidedly objected to the project.'

Morgan, intent on schemes of vengeance, paid no heed to the remonstrances of Mary's tried and faithful counsellors, but took into his confidence two of Walsingham's most artful spies, in the disguise of Catholic priests-Gifford and Greatly by name-whom he recommended to the deluded Mary, as well as Poley and Maude, two other of the agents of that statesman. Easy enough would it have been for Walsingham, who had perfect information of the proceedings of the conspirators from the first, to have crushed the plot in its infancy; but it was his occult policy to nurse it till it became organized into a shape sufficiently formidable to Elizabeth, to bring her to the conclusion, that her life would never be safe while the Scottish queen was in existence, and, above all, to furnish a plausible pretext for the execution of Mary.

The principal leaders of the conspiracy were Ballard, a Catholic priest, and Savage, a soldier of fortune, who undertook to assassinate queen Elizabeth with his own hand. These unprincipled desperadoes, aided by their treacherous colleagues, succeeded in beguiling Anthony Babington of Dethick, a young gentleman of wealth and ancient lineage in Derbyshire, into the confederacy. Babington, who was a person of enthusiastic temperament, was warmly attached to the cause of Mary, for whom he had formerly performed the perilous service of transmitting letters during her imprisonment at Sheffield. At first, he objected to any attempt against his own sovereign; but the sophistry of Ballard, and the persuasions of the treacherous agents of Walsingham, not only prevailed over his scruples, but induced him to go the whole length of the plot, even to the proposed murder. This deed, he protested, ought not to be entrusted to the single arm of Savage, and proposed that six gentlemen should be associated for that purpose. How a man of a naturally generous and chivalric disposition could devise so cowardly a combination against the person of a female, appears almost incredible; but such was the blind excitement of party-feeling, and religious zeal, that he recklessly 1 Murdin's State Papers. Egerton Papers. Lingard. 2 Camden. Murdin. Lingard.

2