What a cruel snare is here laid for this faithful servant! He is tempted to commit a murder, and at the same time has orders from his Sovereign to destroy the warrant for doing it. He was too wise and too honourable to do either the one or the other. Had he fallen into the snare, we may guess, from the fate of Davidson, what would have been his. Paulet, in return, thus writes to Walsingham:—‘Your letters of yesterday coming to my hand this day, I would not fail, according to your directions, to return my answer with all possible speed; which I shall deliver unto you with great grief and bitterness of mind, in that I am so unhappy, as living to see this unhappy day, in which I am required, by direction of my most gracious Sovereign, to do an act which God and the law forbiddeth. My goods and life are at her Majesty’s disposition, and I am ready to lose them the next morrow if it shall please her. But God forbid I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience, or leave so great a blot to my poor posterity, as shed blood without law or warrant.”
* What a picture have we here, of the heroine of England! Wooing a faithful servant to commit a clandestine murder, which she herself durst not avow! The portrait of King John, in the same predicament, practising with Hubert to murder his nephew, then under his charge, shows how intimately the great Poet was acquainted with nature.
O my gentle Hubert,
We owe thee much! Within this wall of flesh,
There is a soul, counts thee her creditor,
And with advantage means to pay thy love,
And, my good friend, thy voluntary oath
Lives in this bosom dearly cherished.
[199] Mackenzie’s Lives of the Scottish Writers, vol. iii. p. 336.—Robertson, vol. ii. p. 194.—Chalmers, vol. i. p. 449.
[200] La Mort de la Royne d’Ecosse in Jebb, vol. ii. p. 611.
[201] Jebb, vol. ii. p. 622. et seq.
[202] “Mary’s testament and letters,” says Ritson the antiquarian, “which I have seen, blotted with her tears in the Scotch College, Paris, will remain perpetual monuments of singular abilities, tenderness, and affection,—of a head and heart of which no other Queen in the world was probably ever possessed.”
[203] Jebb, vol. ii. p. 628, et seq.
[204] History of Fotheringay, p. 79.
[205] Among these attendants were her physician Bourgoine, who afterwards wrote a long and circumstantial narrative of her death, and Jane Kennedy, formerly mentioned on the occasion of Mary’s escape from Loch-Leven.