‘Lady ARUNDEL went immediately to my Lord Ambassador [WOTTON], telling him she came to hear from his own mouth what she had heard from his servant’s.’ When Sir Henry had repeated the statement of his secretary, the Lady asked him how long the accusation and the resolution of the Senate had been known to him. He replied that reports of the alleged intercourse with FOSCARINI had reached him some fifteen days before, or more; but that of the resolution of the Senate he had heard only on that morning. ‘She asked him why he did never let her understand of the report all that time? He said because she spake not to him of it.’ To Lady ARUNDEL’S pithy rejoinder that it would have been hard for her to speak of a matter of which she had never heard the least rumour until that day, and to her further protestation that she had not even seen FOSCARINI since the time of his visit to England, some years earlier, Sir Henry replied, ‘I believe there was no such matter;’ but he refused to disclose the name of the person who had first spoken to him of the accusation. To his renewed advice that her ladyship should not stir farther in the matter, she declined to accede. [Sidenote: MS. ADDIT., 4176, § 156. (B. M.)] It concerned her honour, and her husband’s honour, she said, to have public conference with the Doge and Council without delay. From carrying out this resolve the ambassador found it impossible to dissuade her. That conference took place on the following day with the remarkable result of a public declaration by the Doge that no mention had ever been made of Lady ARUNDEL’S name, or of the name of any person nearly or remotely connected with her, either at any stage of the proceedings against FOSCARINI, or in any of the discussions which had arisen out of his conspiracy. When the audience given to Lady ARUNDEL by the Doge had been made the subject of a communication to the Senate, that body instructed the Venetian Ambassador in England to confer with Lord ARUNDEL. [Sidenote: _Deliberations of the Senate of Venice_; printed by Hardy, in _Report on Venetian Archives_, pp. 78–84 (1866).] ‘You are,’ said they, ‘to speak to the Earl Marshal in such strong and earnest language that he may retain no doubt of the invalidity of the report, and may remain perfectly convinced of the esteem and cordial affection entertained towards him by the Republic; augmented as such feelings are by the open and dignified mode of life led here by the Countess, and in which she hastens the education of her sons in the sciences to make them—as they will become—faithful imitators of their meritorious father and their ancestors.’ Sir Henry WOTTON’S motive in the strange part taken by him in this incident is nowhere disclosed. He had to listen to several indirect reproofs, both from the Doge and from the Senate, which were none the less incisive on account of the courtly language in which they were couched.