ose admirers
of Mary who assume her to have been an almost absolute imbecile, gifted
with the power of imposing herself on the world as a woman of
unsurpassed ability, that, while cognizant of the plot for her
deliverance by English rebels and an invading army of foreign
auxiliaries, she might have been innocently unconscious that this
conspiracy involved the simultaneous assassination of Elizabeth. In the
conduct and detection of her correspondence with Babington, traitor was
played off against traitor, and spies were utilized against assassins,
with as little scruple as could be required or expected in the diplomacy
of the time.

As in the case of the casket letters, it is alleged that forgery was
employed to interpolate sufficient evidence of Mary's complicity in a
design of which it is thought credible that she was kept in ignorance by
the traitors and murderers who had enrolled themselves in her
service--that one who pensioned the actual murderer of Murray and a
would-be murderer of Elizabeth was incapable of approving what her keen
and practised intelligence was too blunt and torpid to anticipate as
inevitable and inseparable from the general design. In August the
conspirators were netted, and Mary was arrested at the gate of Tixall
Park, whither Paulet had taken her under pretence of a hunting-party. At
Tixall she was detained till her papers at Chartley had undergone
thorough research. That she was at length taken in her own toils, even
such a dullard as her admirers depict her could not have failed to
understand; that she was no such dastard as to desire or deserve such
defenders, the whole brief course of her remaining life bore consistent
and irrefragable witness.

Her first thought on her return to Chartley was one of loyal gratitude
and womanly sympathy. She cheered the wife of her English secretary, now
under arrest, with promises to answer for her husband to all accusations
brought against him; took her new-born child from the mother's arms, and
in default of clergy baptized it, to Paulet's Puritanic horror, with her
own hands by her own name.

The next or the twin-born impulse of her indomitable nature was, as
usual in all times of danger, one of passionate and high-spirited
defiance on discovering the seizure of her papers. A fortnight afterward
her keys and her money were confiscated, while she, bedridden and unable
to move her hand, could only ply the terrible weapon of her bitter and
fiery tongue