But the whole affair was a mere Court intrigue, with which no considerable party in the nation would associate itself, Mary's right to the throne being all but universally recognised; and on the tenth day of her shadowy sovereignty, Jane was abruptly informed by her father, that she must put off her state and royal robes, and be content with a private station. "I shall put them off," she replied, "much more willingly than I put them on; and I should never have done it, but for you and my mother." The Lady Jane's palace was thenceforth her prison; and on the 3rd of November following, she, her husband, and others, were arraigned for high treason at Guildhall, found guilty, and condemned to die: but there was no apparent intention on the part of the Queen to carry the sentence into execution, forasmuch that she was allowed the liberty of the Tower; and a belief, grounded upon expressions which her Majesty had designedly let fall, that she and Dudley would be ultimately liberated, became general. Meanwhile, Mary was busy with her coronation, which she celebrated with great splendour, and next with negotiations for her marriage with Philip of Spain; a project that was no sooner bruited in the common ear, than it was everywhere denounced as a scheme to bring England under the yoke of Spain, and make Englishmen slaves to strangers. The perturbation of the people increased: Sir Thomas Wyatt, a gentleman of Kent, with the Duke of Suffolk and others, took up arms, with the ostensible purpose of removing the Queen's evil counsellors; and having obtained some slight successes against the Royal forces, Wyatt advanced to London, and fought a successful skirmish at Charing Cross, but was soon baffled, secured, beheaded, and quartered; his head being placed upon the gallows at Hay Hill, near Hyde Park! Suffolk, the Lady Jane's father, was captured in Warwickshire by the Earl of Huntingdon, and the rebellion was at an end. Its heaviest penalty remained to be paid by the innocent blood of the Lady Jane, to whom word was sent by Dr. Feckenham that she must prepare for death on the morrow; —brief warning, but needless counsel, for that preparation had been her sole employment during six months of captivity, and the Queen's message was received by her as the announcement of a great deliverance! Dr. Feckenham, who had held many conferences with her upon points of doctrine, was again earnest with her to reconcile herself with the Roman Catholic Church; but, with more than her usual sweetness, she declined further controversy. He, however, unasked, procured her and Dudley a three days' respite, during which she addressed the following letter to the Duke of Suffolk : "Father, Though it hath pleased God to hasten my death by you, by whom my life should rather have been lengthened, yet can I patiently take it; and I yield God more hearty thanks for shortening my woful days, than if all the world had been given unto my possession with life lengthened at my own will.” Had the father a human heart, it must have been pierced as with daggers by those words! The earnest faith, the meek resignedness that graced the life and glorified the death of the Lady Jane, were not more strikingly evinced than her unaffected recognition of the legality of the sentence that had gone forth against her. In a letter to the marble-hearted Queen, she says, after full admission of her technical guilt, "Yet do I assuredly trust that my offence towards God is so much the less, in that, being of so royal a state as I was, mine enforced honours blended never with mine innocent heart." She had beguiled the long, sad hours of captivity by such lines as these: "Do never think it strange, The same to thee may happen. If God do help thee, Hate shall not hurt thee; If God do fail thee, Then shall not labour prevail thee." She sent her sister Katherine a Greek Testament, as the most precious bequest she could make her, were the riches of the whole world hers; and all that remained for her to do fulfilled, she rose at dawn of her last day on earth in perfect peace with herself and all mankind. She refused to see her husband previous to his execution, lest the interview should shake his resolution, and saw his corpse carried past her window with but passing emotion. He had gone before her; but their eternal reunion would be but for a brief space delayed! She was accompanied to the scaffold by her maiden, Mistress Tylney, and Helen, to whom she gave her gloves and handkerchief, and Doctor Feckenham, whom, though he had failed in changing her religious convictions, she warmly esteemed. "God," said she, addressing him,-" God will abundantly requite you, good sir, for your humanity to me; though it gave me more uneasiness than all the terrors of approaching death." Then turning towards the spectators, K he said, "Good people, I am come hither to die, and by law I am condemned to do the same. The fact against the Queen's Highness was unlawful, and the consenting thereunto by me; but touching the procurement and desire thereof by me or on my behalf, I do wash my hands thereof in innocency before God and the face of you good Christian people this day." And therewith, it is added, "she wrung her hands in token of her innocency." The trembling hands of her maidens could not remove her neck-clothing: she did it herself, and then said to Dr. Feckenham, "Shall we repeat the 51st Psalm ?" They did so, in English. "Pray you, despatch me quickly," she said, after a handkerchief had been placed before her eyes, and kneeling down, sought with her hand for the block, and not immediately finding it, piteously exclaimed, "What shall I do-where is it?" It was found: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!" rose tremblingly to heaven, and all was over! This tragedy was consummated on the 12th of February, 1554, the seventeenth year of the Lady Jane's brief but memorable life. Ten days later, the Duke of Suffolk perished by the headsman's axe. THE MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS. HE fiery reaction against the time-sanctioned and timeworn ecclesiastical polity of Christendom which, in the sixteenth century, swept over Europe,-in some countries lighting up an undying flame, in others fading quickly out with the weak straw on fire which lent it ephemeral brightness and fervency,-greatly inflamed and envenomed the strife and turmoil into which a succession of misfortunes had plunged Scotland; and never, perhaps, did her dearly-won nationality appear so deeply perilled as by the fierce ordeal by which, in its spirit and essence, it has been stamped with enduring vitality. The first throes of the volcanic conflagration kindled by the breath of Knox, and fed by the fires of persecution, threw its lava-spray upon the baby-diadem of Mary Queen of Scots, and abated nothing of its unrespecting fury till she, the crowned impersonation of a Right no longer recognised as Divine, had been swept from her throne to exile and to death:-a brief recapitulation, therefore, of the preliminary events which gave the revolt of the Scottish people against Papal domination fatal and overwhelming power in her own regard, is essential to the slightest sketch of her character and fortunes as marked and foreshadowed in the story of her girlish days;-a story moreover, I may premise, which, though not directly involving the imputations upon her mature years, still as hotly as ever disputed by enthusiastic and unscrupulous champions and assailants, cast, nevertheless, a bright glow of youthful promise over those dubious and obscure passages which, strengthened by |