majesty, but only of
his mother." "That," said Leicester, "were to make him _party_ (rival or
adversary) to the queen my mistress." "He will be far more party,"
replied Gray, "if he be in her place through her death." Her majesty
exclaimed, that she should not have a worse in his mother's place, and
added; "Tell your king what good I have done for him in holding the
crown on his head since he was born, and that I _mind_ (intend) to keep
the league that now stands between us, and if he break it, it shall be a
double fault." With this speech she would have left them; but they
persisted in arguing the matter further, though in vain. Gray then
requested that Mary's life might be spared for fifteen days; the queen
refused: sir Robert Melvil begged for only eight days; she said not for
an hour, and so quitted them.

After this, the Scotch ambassadors assumed a tone of menace: but the
perfidious Gray secretly fortified Elizabeth's resolution with the
proverb, "The dead cannot bite;" and undertook soon to pacify, in any
event, the anger of his master, whose minion he at this time was.

No sooner had Elizabeth silenced with this show of inflexibility all the
pleadings or menaces by which others had attempted to divert her from
her fatal aim, than she began, as in the affair of the French marriage,
to feel her own resolution waver. It appears unquestionable that to
affected delays a real hesitation succeeded. When her pride was no
longer irritated by opposition, she had leisure to survey the meditated
deed in every light; and as it rose upon her view in all its native
deformity, anxious fears for her own fame and credit, yet untainted by
any crime, and perhaps genuine scruples of conscience, forcibly assailed
her resolution. But her ministers, deeply sensible that both she and
they had already gone too far to recede with reputation or with safety,
encountered her growing reluctance with a proportional increase in the
vehemence of their clamors for what they called, and perhaps thought,
justice. All the hazards to which her excess of clemency might be
imagined to expose her, were conjured up in the most alarming forms to
repel her scruples. A plot for her assassination was disclosed, to which
the French ambassador was ascertained to have been privy;--rumors were
raised of invasions and insurrections; and it may be suspected that the
queen, really alarmed in the first instance by the representations of
her council, voluntarily con