On All Saints’ Day arrived in England a suitor for the hand of Queen Elizabeth: Francis, Duke of Alençon, King of the Netherlands, the short-lived heir to the throne of King Henry the Third of France. With that King, while Duke of Anjou, and with Alençon for nine years past (as for three yet to come), Elizabeth had carried on negotiations which ended in smoke; but she now announced that she “would marry at last.” Little Froggy, as she endearingly called him, was ugly to a degree, and many years younger than her Majesty; he was brother-in-law to the Queen of Scots, who was her Majesty’s prisoner at Sheffield. The dominant, ultra-bigoted party took extreme alarm at the near prospect of toleration for Catholics which such a royal match suggested to them. To reassure them, it might just now be most useful, thought the Council, to hang a Jesuit or two. On the 14th of the month Campion and eight others were arraigned before the grand jury in Westminster Hall. For “treasonable intents” of the Queen’s deprivation and murder, these “secret and privy practices of sinister devices,” befitting one “led astray by the devil,” had “Edmund Campion, clerk,” made his re-entry into England, the Pope, meanwhile, being not only aware of his act, but its “author and onsetter”! He was commanded, as were all those lumped with him in a common accusation, to plead Guilty or Not Guilty. Up went all the right arms of these “devotaries, and dead men to this world, who travelled only for souls,” as Campion himself called them: all but his, so disabled by the rack that he could not stir it from the furred cuff in which it lay. But a quick-witted comrade turned and took off the cuff, “humbly kissing the sacred hands so wrung for the confession of Christ,” and lifted it high to cry its own mute Not Guilty with the rest. The Spanish Ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, standing close by with his secretary, saw, with a pang of pity, that all the finger-nails were gone from Campion’s swollen hands. The trial proper began on the 20th, before “such a presence of people of the more honourable, wise, learned, and best sort as was never seen or heard of in that court in ours or our fathers’ memories before us ... so wonderful an expectation there was to see the end of this marvellous tragedy ... [of] such as they knew in conscience to be innocent.” They all heard Ralph Sherwin say, in a loud clear voice: “The plain ground of our standing here is religion, and not treason.”