reasonable as it seems. Treason had been a political
calamity with the Seymours. Their progenitor, the Duke of Somerset the
Protector, had found that "all his honours," as Frankland strangely
expresses it, "had helped him too forwards to hop headless." Henry,
Elizabeth, and James, says the same writer, considered that it was
needful, as indeed in all sovereignties, that those who were nearest the
crown "should be narrowly looked into for marriage."

But we have left the Lady Arabella alone and mournful on the seas, not
praying for favourable gales to convey her away, but still imploring her
attendants to linger for her Seymour; still straining her sight to the
point of the horizon for some speck which might give a hope of the
approach of the boat freighted with all her love. Alas! never more was
Arabella to cast a single look on her lover and her husband! She was
overtaken by a pink in the king's service, in Calais roads and now she
declared that she cared not to be brought back again to her imprisonment
should Seymour escape, whose safety was dearest to her!

The life of the unhappy, the melancholy, and the distracted Arabella
Stuart is now to close in an imprisonment, which lasted only four years;
for her constitutional delicacy, her rooted sorrow, and the violence of
her feelings, sunk beneath the hopelessness of her situation, and a
secret resolution in her mind to refuse the aid of her physicians, and
to wear away the faster if she could, the feeble remains of life. But
who shall paint the emotions of a mind which so much grief, and so much
love, and distraction itself, equally possessed!

What passed in that dreadful imprisonment cannot perhaps be recovered
for authentic history; but enough is known; that her mind grew impaired,
that she finally lost her reason, and if the duration of her
imprisonment was short, it was only terminated by her death.[339] Some
loose effusions, often begun and never ended, written and erased,
incoherent and rational, yet remain in the fragments of her papers. In a
letter she proposed addressing to Viscount Fenton, to implore for her
his majesty's favour again, she says, "Good my lord, consider the fault
cannot be uncommitted; neither can any more be required of any earthly
creature but confession and most humble submission." In a paragraph she
had written, but crossed out, it seems that a present of her work had
been refused by the king, and that she had no one about her whom she
m