Beddingfield looked over her as she wrote, took the paper into his own
keeping when she paused, and brought it back to her when she chose to
resume her task.

Yet could not his utmost precaution entirely cut off her communications
with the large and zealous party who rested upon her all their hopes of
better times for themselves or for the country. Through the medium of a
visitor to one of her ladies, she received the satisfactory assurance
that none of the prisoners for Wyat's business had been brought to utter
any thing by which she could be endangered. Perhaps it was with
immediate reference to this intelligence that she wrote with a diamond
on her window the homely but expressive distich,

"Much suspected by me
Nothing proved can be,
Quoth Elizabeth prisoner."

But these secret intelligencers were not always fortunate enough to
escape detection, of which the consequences were rendered very grievous
through the arbitrary severity of Mary's government, and the peculiar
malice exercised by Gardiner against the adherents of the princess.

Sir John Harrington, son to the gentleman of the same name formerly
mentioned as a follower of admiral Seymour, thus, in his _Brief View of
the Church_, sums up the character of this celebrated bishop of
Winchester, with reference to this part of his conduct.

"Lastly, the plots he laid to entrap the lady Elizabeth, and his
terrible hard usage of all her followers, I cannot yet scarce think of
with charity, nor write of with patience. My father, for only carrying a
letter to the lady Elizabeth, and professing to wish her well, he kept
in the Tower twelve months, and made him spend a thousand pounds ere he
could be free of that trouble. My mother, that then served the lady
Elizabeth, he caused to be sequestered from her as an heretic, insomuch
that her own father durst not take her into his house, but she was glad
to sojourn with one Mr. Topcliff; so as I may say in some sort, this
bishop persecuted me before I was born."

In the twelfth month of his imprisonment, this unfortunate Harrington,
having previously sent to the bishop many letters and petitions for
liberty without effect, had the courage to address to him a "Sonnet,"
which his son has cited as "no ill verse for those unrefined times;" a
modest commendation of lines so spirited, which the taste of the more
modern reader, however fastidious, need not hesitate to confirm.

TO BISHOP GARDINER.

1.