;
most humbly beseeching your Majesty to pardon and
remit our former infirmities, and most graciously
to accept our meanings, which have been ever to
serve your Highness truly, and so shall remain with
all our power and force, to the effusion of our
blood, as these bearers, our very good Lords, the
Earls of Arundel and Paget, can, and be ready more
particularly to declare--to whom it may please your
excellent Majesty to give firm credence; and thus
we do and shall daily pray to Almighty God for the
preservation of your most royal person long to
reign over us."--_Lansdowne MSS._ 3. Endorsed, in
Cecil's hand, "Copy of the Letter of the Lords to
the Queen Mary from Baynard's Castle." The
signatures are, unfortunately, wanting.]

The two lords immediately mounted and galloped off into the darkness,
followed by thirty horse, leaving the lights of illuminated London
gleaming behind them.

The duke's position was already desperate: on the 18th, before the
proclamation in London, Mary had felt herself strong enough to send
orders to the Mayor of Cambridge for his arrest;[53] and, although he
had as yet been personally unmolested, he was powerless in the midst
of an army which was virtually in Mary's service. The news of the
revolution in London first reached him by a private hand. He at once
sent for Sandys, and, going with him to the market cross, he declared,
after one violent clutch at his beard, that he had acted under orders
from the council; the council, he understood, had changed their minds,
and he would change his mind also; therefore he cried, "God save Queen
Mary," and with a strained effort at a show of satisfaction, he, too,
like Pembroke, threw up his cap. The queen, he said to Sandys, was a
merciful woman, and there would be a general pardon. "Though the queen
grant you a {p.022} pardon," Sandys answered, "the lords never will;
you can hope nothing from those who now rule."[54]

[Footnote 53: Renard to Charles V.: _Rolls House
MSS._]

[Footnote 54: Foxe, vol. viii.]

It was true that he could hope nothing--the hatred of the whole
nation, which before his late treasons he