Now, since I have been on your part informed of the sentence of your
last meeting of Parliament, Lord Buckhurst and Beale having admonished
me to prepare for the end of my long and weary pilgrimage, I beg to
return you thanks on my part for these happy tidings, and to entreat you
to vouchsafe to me certain points for the discharge of my conscience.
But since Sir A. Paulet has informed me (though falsely) that you had
indulged me by having restored to me my almoner, and the money that they
had taken from me, and that the remainder would follow; for all this I
would willingly return you thanks, and supplicate still further as a
last request, which I have thought for many reasons I ought to ask of
you alone, that you will accord this ultimate grace, for which I should
not like to be indebted to any other, since I have no hope of finding
aught but cruelty from the Puritans, who are at this time, God knows
wherefore! the first in authority, and the most bitter against me.
I will accuse no one: nay, I pardon with a sincere heart every one, even
as I desire every one may grant forgiveness to me, God the first. But I
know that you, more than any one, ought to feel at heart the honour or
dishonour of your own blood, and that, moreover, of a queen and the
daughter of a king.
_A LAST REQUEST_
Then, Madame, for the sake of that Jesus to whose name all powers bow, I
require you to ordain that when my enemies have slaked their black
thirst for my innocent blood, you will permit my poor desolated servants
altogether to carry away my corpse, to bury it in holy ground with the
other queens of France, my predecessors, especially near the late queen,
my mother; having this in recollection, that in Scotland the bodies of
the kings, my predecessors, have been outraged, and the churches
profaned and abolished; and that as I shall suffer in this country, I
shall not be given place near the kings, your predecessors, who are mine
as well as yours: for according to our religion, we think much of being
interred in holy earth. As they tell me that you will in nothing force
my conscience nor my religion, and have even conceded me a priest,
refuse me not this my last request, that you will permit free sepulchre
to this body when the soul is separated, which, when united, could never
obtain liberty to live in repose, such as you would procure for
yourself; against which repose--before God I speak--I never aimed a
blow: but God will let you see the truth of all after my death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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