to spare her means ruin to us.'

Meanwhile they came upon the traces of a new attempt. In presence of
the elder French ambassador, Aubespine, a partisan of the Guises,
mention was made of the necessity of killing Elizabeth in order to
save Mary at the last moment. One of his officers spoke with a person
who was known in the palace, and who undertook to pile up a mass of
gunpowder under Elizabeth's chamber sufficient to blow it into the
air; he was led to hope for rewards from Guise and his brother
Mayenne, whose interests would have been greatly promoted by such a
deed.[263] But this time too Elizabeth was made acquainted with the
design before it came to maturity. She ascribed her new danger to the
silence, if not to the instigation, of the ambassador, the friend of
the Guises: in its discovery she saw the hand of God. 'I nourish,' she
exclaims, 'the viper that poisons me;--to save her they would have
taken my life: am I to offer myself as a prey to every villain?'[264]
At a moment when she was especially struck with the danger which
threatened her from the very existence of her rival, after a
conversation with the Lord Admiral, she had the long-prepared order
for the execution brought to her, and signed it with quick and
resolute strokes of the pen.

The observation of Parliament, that her safety and the peace of the
country required her enemy's death, at last gained the upper hand with
her as well. But this did not imply that her conflicting feelings were
completely silenced. She was haunted in her dreams by the idea of the
execution. She had once more recourse to the thought that some
serviceable hand might spare her the last authorisation, by secretly
executing the sentence of the judges--an act which seemed to be
justified even by the words of the Association; the demand was made in
due form to the Keeper of the prisoner, Sir Amyas Paulet; he rejected
it--and how could anything else have been expected from the
conscientious Puritan--with an expression of his astonishment and
indignation. Elizabeth had commissioned Secretary Davison, when she
signed the order, to have it sealed with the Great Seal. Her idea
seems to have been that, when all the forms had been duly complied
with, she might the more easily get a secret execution, or that at
some critical moment it might be at once performed; but she still
meant to keep the matter in her own hand: for the custom was, before
the last step, to once more ask her approv