"And all I owe to you, Ida," rejoined the knight, "they might comprehend the feelings that actuate us both. I look to you, dear one, whatever be their prophecies, to give them the lie."
"I will do it," replied Ida Mara; and she kept her word, leaving on record, that, for once, the marriage of a man of more than sixty with a girl of two-and-twenty produced happiness to both.
FOOTNOTES
[Footnote 1]: A similar mantelpiece is still to be seen in the house of J. Wood, Esq., of Sandwich, in which Queen Elizabeth resided during her visit to that ancient town.
[Footnote 2]: She made use of very nearly the same expressions herself to Cardinal Bentivoglio.
[Footnote 3]: I need only cite the instance of Lady Rich, who was one of the public and favourite companions of Anne of Denmark, while undergoing the ordeal of the ecclesiastical courts on the charge of notorious adultery, fully established against her.
[Footnote 4]: The perfumer of the Count de Taxis is mentioned by Arabella Stuart herself, in one of her letters to her uncle, the Earl of Shrewsbury.
[Footnote 5]: Such acts were not at all uncommon in the reign of James I.
[Footnote 6]: It is proved incontrovertibly by Mr. Lodge, from papers amongst the Harleian manuscripts, that such a permission had been obtained from the King, and that upon it the Lady Arabella acted.
[Footnote 7]: The Countess was deceived in her expectations; for the Judges confirmed the dictum, that a refusal to answer questions proposed by the Privy Council in affairs of state is a contempt of the King's prerogative. The best authority upon the law of evidence that we possess, Mr. S. M. Phillips, does not even except cases in which the person by his answer might criminate himself; although it is remarked, in his notes upon the State Trials, that in such a case the council would, probably, in the present day, allow the general principle of the law to maintain, that no person is compellable to criminate himself, or supply any information which would have that tendency. I need hardly tell the reader that the accounts of this celebrated scene vary in many particulars; but all agree that the Countess refused to answer in private, appealing to a public court.