ENGLAND: A. D. 1583. The expedition of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Formal possession taken of Newfoundland. See AMERICA: A. D. 1583. ENGLAND: A. D. 1584-1590. Raleigh's colonizing attempts in America. See AMERICA: A. D. 1584-1586; and 1587-1590. ENGLAND: A. D. 1585-1586. Leicester in the Low Countries. Queen Elizabeth's treacherous dealing with the struggling Netherlanders. See NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1585-1586. ENGLAND: A. D. 1585-1587. Mary Queen of Scots and the Catholic conspiracies. Her trial and execution. "Maddened by persecution, by the hopelessness of rebellion within or deliverance from without, the fiercer Catholics listened to schemes of assassination, to which the murder of William of Orange lent at the moment a terrible significance. The detection of Somerville, a fanatic who had received the host before setting out for London 'to shoot the Queen with his dagg,' was followed by measures of natural severity, by the flight and arrest of Catholic gentry, by a vigourous purification of the Inns of Court, where a few Catholics lingered, and by the dispatch of fresh batches of priests to the block. The trial and death of Parry, a member of the House of Commons who had served in the Queen's household, on a similar charge, brought the Parliament together in a transport of horror and loyalty. {842} All Jesuits and seminary priests were banished from the realm on pain of death. A bill for the security of the Queen disqualified any claimant of the succession who had instigated subjects to rebellion or hurt to the Queen's person from ever succeeding to the crown. The threat was aimed at Mary Stuart. Weary of her long restraint, of her failure to rouse Philip or Scotland to aid her, of the baffled revolt of the English Catholics and the baffled intrigues of the Jesuits, she bent for a moment to submission. 'Let me go,' she wrote to Elizabeth; 'let me retire from this island to some solitude where I may prepare my soul to die. Grant this and I will sign away every right which either I or mine can claim.' But the cry was useless, and her despair found a new and more terrible hope in the plots against Elizabeth's life. She knew and approved the vow of Anthony Babington and a band of young Catholics, for the most part connected with the royal household, to kill the Queen; but plot and approval alike passed through Walsingham's hands, and the seizure of Mary's correspondence revealed her guilt. In spite of her protests, a commission of peers sat as her judges at Fotheringay Castle; and their verdict of 'guilty' annihilated, under the provisions of the recent statute, her claim to the crown. The streets of London blazed with bonfires, and peals rang out from steeple to steeple, at the news of her condemnation; but, in spite of the prayer of Parliament for her execution, and