A commission of the nobles was appointed to try her at Fotheringay, on the charge of plotting against the life of Elizabeth. Mary protested against the manner in which she was to be tried as belittling an independent sovereign, who was subject neither to the laws nor to the Queen of England. But at length, through fear that her refusal to appear before the commissioners would be interpreted as a sign of guilt, and through dread of being dispatched secretly by poison--in which case her enemies could assert what they wished about the way she died--she consented to appear, and for two days sat before the commissioners listening to and answering accusations. The proceedings in which she was constrained to take part cannot properly be called a trial. She was deprived, as far as possible, of every means of defence; she had no secretary, her correspondence was withheld from her, she was refused counsel. "Alas," she said to her faithful servant Melville, as she took her seat the first day before the Commissioners, "Alas, here are many counsellors, but not one for me." Nevertheless she spoke with so much courage and energy, and showed so little regard for the wrath of her enemies, or even for death itself, so long as her honour was vindicated, that she surprised and partly confounded the hard-hearted zealots who were hounding her to death. On the 14th of October, the trial was opened in a large room in Fotheringay Castle. Seated on benches placed in the middle of the room and along both walls were all the Peers of England who could conveniently be brought together, as well as the various officers of the court. Once upon a time, in the brave days of knight-errantry, no injured lady need have feared to present herself and plead her cause before the assembled chivalry of "Merry England," but ’old times were changed, old manners gone.’ At 9 o’clock in the forenoon, the Queen entered, supported by Melville and Bourgoin her physician. She had been personally acquainted with but very few of those who sat there to pass judgment upon her. Many of them had been known to her by name, a few had been attached to her cause, and she looked about in the hope of meeting an eye that would reveal the presence of a friend. But she was disappointed. No one in that hostile assembly, however he might feel in his heart, would venture now to betray any sign of sympathy. Three faces must have impressed her more than all the rest as suggesting, in three different periods, the history of her troubled career. There she saw Sir Ralph Sadler, the English Ambassador who, forty-four years before, had stood over her cradle in the nursery at Linlithgow and pronounced her a "right fair and goodly child;" there she saw Sir William Cecil (now Lord Burleigh), who had been her ablest and most industrious enemy through all the years of her short reign, and who had contributed more perhaps that any other individual to produce the