This offensive behaviour of the French court is the apology of Elizabeth's intrigues during the same period with the malcontents, which to a certain extent cannot be denied by any one who has read the collection above quoted; though I do not think Dr. Lingard warranted in asserting her privity to the conspiracy of Amboise as a proved fact. Throckmorton was a man very likely to exceed his instructions; and there is much reason to believe that he did so. It is remarkable that no modern French writer that I have seen, Anquetil, Garnier, Lacretelle, or the editors of the _General Collection of Memoirs_, seem to have been aware of Elizabeth's secret intrigues with the king of Navarre and other protestant chiefs in 1559, which these letters, published by Forbes in 1740, demonstrate. [197] Burnet, i. Append. 266. Many letters, both of Mary herself and of her secretary, the famous Maitland of Lethington, occur in Haynes's _State Papers_, about the end of 1561. In one of his to Cecil, he urges, in answer to what had been alleged by the English court, that a collateral successor had never been declared in any prince's life-time, that whatever reason there might be for that, "if the succession had remained untouched according to the law, yet where by a limitation men had gone about to prevent the providence of God, and shift one into the place due to another, the offended party could not but seek the redress thereof."--P. 373. [198] A very remarkable letter of the Earl of Sussex, October 22, 1568, contains these words: "I think surely no end can be made good for England, except the person of the Scottish queen be detained, by one means or other, in England." The whole letter manifests the spirit of Elizabeth's advisers, and does no great credit to Sussex's sense of justice, but a great deal to his ability. Yet he afterwards became an advocate for the Duke of Norfolk's marriage with Mary. Lodge's _Illustrations_, vol. ii. p. 4. [199] Hume and Carte say, this first illness was the small-pox. But it appears by a letter from the queen to Lord Shrewsbury (Lodge, 279) that her attack in 1571 was suspected to be that disorder. [200] Haynes, 580. [201] In a conversation which Mary had with one Rooksby, a spy of Cecil's, about the spring of 1566, she imprudently named several of her friends, and of others whom she hoped to win, such as the Duke of Norfolk, the Earls of Derby, Northumberland, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Shrewsbury. "She had the better hope of this, for that she thought them to be all of the old religion, which she meant to restore again with all expedition, and thereby win the hearts of the common people." The whole passage is worth notice. Haynes, 447. See also Melvil's _Memoirs_, for the dispositions of an English party towards Mary in 1566.