putting her hand to her head when the King of Scots was named to succeed
her, they all knew he was the man she desired should reign after her."
Such a sign as that of a dying woman putting her hand to her head was,
to say the least, a very ambiguous acknowledgment of the right of the
Scottish monarch to the English throne. The "odd" but very _naive_
account of Robert Cary, afterwards Earl of Monmouth, is not furnished
with dates, nor with the exactness of a diary. Something might have
occurred on a preceding day which had not reached him. Camden describes
the death-bed scene of Elizabeth; by this authentic writer it appears
that she had confided her state-secret of the succession to the lord
admiral (the Earl of Nottingham); and when the earl found the queen
almost at her extremity, _he communicated her majesty's secret to the
council_, who commissioned the lord admiral, the lord keeper, and the
secretary, to wait on her majesty, and acquaint her that they came in
the name of the rest to learn her pleasure in reference to _the
succession_. The queen was then very weak, and answered them with a
faint voice, that she had already declared, that as she held a regal
sceptre, so she desired no other than a royal successor. When the
secretary requested her to explain herself, the queen said, "I would
have a king succeed me; and who should that he but my nearest kinsman,
the King of Scots?" Here this state conversation was put an end to by
the interference of the archbishop advising her majesty to turn her
thoughts to God. "Never," she replied, "has my mind wandered from him."

An historian of Camden's high integrity would hardly have forged a
fiction to please the new monarch: yet Camden has not been referred to
on this occasion by the exact Birch, who draws his information from the
letters of the French ambassador, Villeroy; information which it appears
the English ministers had confided to this ambassador; nor do we get any
distinct ideas from Elizabeth's more recent popular historian, who could
only transcribe the account of Cary. He had told us a fact which he
could not be mistaken in, that the queen fell speechless on Wednesday,
23rd of March, on which day, however, she called her council, and made
that sign with her hand, which, as the lords choose to understand, for
ever united the two kingdoms. But the noble editor of Cary's Memoirs
(the Earl of Cork and Orrery) has observed that "the speeches made for
Elizabeth on her