"Will you answer, Lady?" asked the King; "once more I ask you, will you answer, that you may not have occasion to accuse our royal mercy?"
"I will not, sir," answered Lady Shrewsbury. "Your Majesty's mercy will stand upon its own foundation, and God grant it has a good one."
"Then commit her," exclaimed James, addressing the Clerk of the Council; "draw out the warrant, sir!"
"And mark, Master Secretary," said Lady Shrewsbury, "let it be put down on the record of this day that I claim my privilege of Peerage, demanding open trial if I be culpable; and that, professing myself willing to answer all lawful questions in a public court, I decline to reply to secret interrogatories, unaided by any counsel or advice. And now God be my defence!"
"Away with her, away with her!" cried the King. "Take her away in safe custody to her own chamber, till the warrant is ready. Let her have time to prepare what is needful, and then send her with a guard to the Tower. We have not often been so bearded in our Council, and 'tis fit that she should be made an example."
"Many such examples would do the Court some service," replied the lady; "and with that I humbly take my leave of your Majesty."[[7]]
Thus saying, she withdrew, escorted to her own apartment by two of the ushers, who treated her with all respect, but stationed themselves at the door till a formal order for her removal to the Tower arrived.
[CHAPTER XXXI.]
There is something very curious in the great difference of feeling with which we contemplate scenes of sorrow and those of vice. It might be naturally supposed, that in the grief of the good, the wise, and the noble, we should find matter only for sympathy and regret--that pain alone would be elicited in beholding it, and that their anguish would communicate nothing but a share of their suffering to ourselves; while the contempt that we feel for vice, by depriving us of all feeling for the vicious, would leave us sorrowless, though abhorrent of their faults.
Such is not the case, however; and to hear tales of the great and generous touched by the hand of undeserved adversity, excites, as is the case in deep tragedy, a certain degree of strange and almost unaccountable pleasure, even while we grieve for their fate, and take part in their sufferings. It is, perhaps, in some degree, that sympathy is in itself a pleasurable emotion; but I do believe that a great part of that which gives sweetness to the tears which we shed over the history of the afflicted good, is the inherent conviction in the mind of man, that there is a state of being, yet to come, where all shall have its compensation,--where woes undeserved, and unmerited pangs, received with resignation and borne with fortitude, shall be repaid by infinite joy and eternal happiness.