other Ministers with temporary suspension from office, and cast Davison into the Tower, where she left him to languish for the remainder of her lifetime, because forsooth they had executed the death-warrant without her knowledge. Walsingham and Davison felt constrained, however, to write Sir Amias Paulet and Sir Drew Drury, whom the Queen thought should be ready to do her will, to point out to them the service their royal Mistress expected from them. "We find," they wrote, "by speech lately uttered by Her Majesty that she doth note in you a lack of that care and zeal of her service that she looked for at your hands, in that you have not in all this time of yourselves (without other provocation) found out some way to shorten the life of the Queen, considering the great peril she (Elizabeth) is subject unto hourly, so long as the said Queen shall live........ "And therefore she (Elizabeth) taketh it most unkindly towards her, that men professing that love towards her that you do, should in any kind or sort, for lack of the discharge of your duties, cast the burthen upon her, knowing, as you do, her indisposition to shed blood, especially of one of that sex and quality, and so near to her in blood as the said Queen is." Closing, they commit Paulet and Drury "to the _protection_ of the Almighty"--which was very thoughtful, seeing how persuasively they had just been soliciting them to an act of assassination. Paulet, in spite of his fierce hatred of Mary, unequivocally refused to entertain the suggestion and expressed his regret that he had lived to see the unhappy day in which he was "required by direction from her most gracious sovereign, to do an act which God and the law forbiddeth." Then, with exquisite propriety of terminology, he commits Walsingham and Davison, not to the "_protection_"--the time when they most needed protection he probably thought was past--but to "the _mercy_ of the Almighty." In the meantime the preparations for the execution were advancing. Elizabeth having signed the death-warrant, Davison handed it over to the Chancellor; at the instance of the Lord Treasurer, Burleigh, the Council convened, and, without waiting further instructions from the Queen, appointed the Earls of Kent and Shrewsbury to execute the warrant. While her fate was being sealed at Westminster, the doomed captive in Fotheringay was expecting, from day to day, to receive the final blow. Though frequently confined to bed by rheumatism in her limbs, she maintained a cheerfulness and composure that greatly annoyed the irascible Paulet. On December the 15th, he complains to Walsingham that "this lady continues to show her perverse and obstinate character." "She shows," he adds, "no sign of repentance and no submission. She does not acknowledge her fault, does not ask for forgiveness and shows no sign of wishing to live." On the 19th of December, she penned a letter of which the following is a portion, to Queen Elizabeth:--