prospect of future power and glory: and this is the return."

The English government, under Elizabeth's direction, concluded to
bring Mary to a public trial. They removed her, accordingly, to the
Castle of Fotheringay. Fotheringay is in Northamptonshire, which is
in the very heart of England, Northampton, the shire town, being
about sixty miles northwest of London. Fotheringay Castle was on the
banks of the River Nen, or Avon, which flows northeast from
Northampton to the sea. A few miles below the castle is the ancient
town of Peterborough, where there was a monastery and a great
cathedral church. The monastery had been built a thousand years
before.

They removed Mary to Fotheringay Castle for her trial, and lawyers,
counselors, commissioners, and officers of state began to assemble
there from all quarters. The castle was a spacious structure. It was
surrounded with two moats, and with double walls, and was strongly
fortified. It contained numerous and spacious apartments, and it had
especially one large hall which was well adapted to the purposes of
this great trial. The preparations for the solemn ordeal through
which Mary was now to pass, brought her forth from the obscurity in
which she had so long been lost to the eyes of mankind, and made her
the universal object of interest and attention in England, Scotland,
and France. The people of all these nations looked on with great
interest at the spectacle of one queen tried solemnly on a charge of
high treason against another. The stories of her beauty, her graces,
her misfortunes, which had slumbered for eighteen years, were all now
revived, and every body felt a warm interest in the poor captive,
worn down by long confinement, and trembling in the hands of what
they feared would be a merciless and terrible power.

Mary was removed to the Castle of Fotheringay toward the end of
September, 1586. The preparations for the trial proceeded slowly.
Every thing in which kings and queens, or affairs of state were
concerned in those days, was conducted with great pomp and ceremony.
The arrangements of the hall were minutely prescribed. At the head
of it a sort of throne was placed, with a royal canopy over it, for
the Queen of England. This, though it was vacant, impressed the court
and the spectators as a symbol of royalty, and denoted that the
sovereignty of Elizabeth was the power before which Mary was
arraigned.

When the preparations were made, Mary refused to ackno