id Jean.

"Prudence, madam, and caution," suggested Dr. Bourgoin. "And hush!"

A crier here shouted aloud, "Oyez, oyez, oyez! Mary, Queen of Scotland
and Dowager of France, come into the Court!"

Then from a door in the centre, leaning on Sir Andrew Melville's arm,
came forward the Queen, in a black velvet dress, her long transparent
veil hanging over it from her cap, and followed by the two Maries, one
carrying a crimson velvet folding-chair, and the other a footstool.
She turned at first towards the throne, but she was motioned aside, and
made to perceive that her place was not there. She drew her slender
figure up with offended dignity. "I am a queen," she said; "I married
a king of France, and my seat ought to be there."

However, with this protest she passed on to her appointed place,
looking sadly round at the assembled judges and lawyers.

"Alas!" she said, "so many counsellors, and not one for me."

Were there any Englishmen there besides Richard Talbot and his son who
felt the pathos of this appeal? One defenceless woman against an array
of the legal force of the whole kingdom. It may be feared that the
feelings of most were as if they had at last secured some wild,
noxious, and incomprehensible animal in their net, on whose struggles
they looked with the unpitying eye of the hunter.

The Lord Chancellor began by declaring that the Queen of England
convened the Court as a duty in one who might not bear the sword in
vain, to examine into the practices against her own life, giving the
Queen of Scots the opportunity of clearing herself.

At the desire of Burghley, the commission was read by the Clerk of the
Court, and Mary then made her public protest against its legality, or
power over her.

It was a wonderful thing, as those spectators in the gallery felt, to
see how brave and how acute was the defence of that solitary lady,
seated there with all those learned men against her; her papers gone,
nothing left to her but her brain and her tongue. No loss of dignity
nor of gentleness was shown in her replies; they were always simple and
direct. The difficulty for her was all the greater that she had not
been allowed to know the form of the accusation, before it was hurled
against her in full force by Mr. Serjeant Gawdy, who detailed the whole
of the conspiracy of Ballard and Babington in all its branches, and
declared her to have known and approved of it, and to have suggested
the manner of executing