"I have, as you see, lost my health and the use of my limbs. I cannot walk without assistance, nor use my arms, and I spend most of my time confined to bed by sickness. Not only this, but through my trials, I have lost the small intellectual gifts bestowed on me by God, such as my memory, which would have aided me to recall those things which I have seen and read, and which might be useful to me in the cruel position in which I now find myself ... Not content with this, my enemies now endeavour to complete my ruin, using against me means that are unheard of towards persons of my rank, and unknown in this kingdom before the reign of the present Queen, and even now not approved by rightful judges, but only by unlawful authority. Against these I appeal to Almighty God, to all Christian princes, and to the estates of this kingdom duly and lawfully assembled. Being innocent and falsely suspected, I am ready to maintain and defend my honour, provided that my defence be publicly recorded, and that I make it in the presences of some princes or foreign judges, or even before my natural judges; and this without prejudice to my mother the Church, to kings, sovereign princes and to my son. With regard to the pretensions long put forward by the English (as their chronicles testify) to suzerainty over my predecessors, the Kings of Scotland, I utterly deny and protest against them, and will not, like a _femme-de peu de coeur_, admit them, nor by any present act, to which I may be constrained, will I fortify such a claim, whereby I should dishonour those princes, my ancestors, and acknowledge them to have been traitors and rebels. Rather than do this, I am ready to die for God and my rights in this quarrel, in which, as in all others, I am innocent." Burleigh had reproached her with having assumed the arms of England, and a spirited discussion after a somewhat legal fashion followed. Passing with characteristic facility from that unprofitable topic, Mary proceeded in the following spirited and pathetic manner:--