Elizabeth's position.--Legitimacy of Mary and Elizabeth's birth.--Mary and Elizabeth's differences.--Courteney's long imprisonment.--Mary's attentions to Courteney.--Courteney's attentions to Elizabeth.--Mary's plan to get Elizabeth in her power.--Elizabeth's wariness.--Wyatt accuses Elizabeth.--Her seizure.--Elizabeth borne in a litter.--She is examined and released.--Elizabeth again arrested.--Her letter to Mary.--Situation of the Tower.--The Traitors' Gate.--Elizabeth conveyed to the Tower.--She is landed at the Traitors' Gate.--Elizabeth's reception at the Tower.--Her unwillingness to enter.--Elizabeth's indignation and grief.--She is closely imprisoned.--Elizabeth in the garden.--The little child and the flowers.--Elizabeth greatly alarmed.--Her removal from the Tower.--Elizabeth's fears.--Mary's designs.--Elizabeth taken to Richmond.--Mary's plan for marrying her.--Elizabeth's journey to Woodstock.--Christmas festivities.--Elizabeth persists in her innocence.--The torch-light visit.--Reconciliation between Elizabeth and Mary.--Elizabeth's release. The imprisonment of Queen Elizabeth in the Tower, which was briefly alluded to in the last chapter, deserves a more full narration than was possible to give to it there. She had retired from court some time before the difficulties about the Spanish match arose. It is true that she took sides with Mary in the contest with Northumberland and the friends of Jane Grey, and she shared her royal sister's triumph in the pomp and parade of the coronation; but, after all, she and Mary could not possibly be very good friends. The marriages of their respective mothers could not both have been valid. Henry the Eighth was so impatient that he could not wait for a divorce from Catharine before he married Anne Boleyn. The only way to make the latter marriage legal, therefore, was to consider the former one null and void _from the beginning_, and if the former one was not thus null and void, the latter must be so. If Henry had waited for a divorce, then both marriages might have been valid, each for the time of its own continuance, and both the princesses might have been lawful heirs; but as it was, neither of them could maintain her own claims to be considered a lawful daughter, without denying, by implication at least, those of the other. They were therefore, as it were, natural enemies. Though they might be outwardly civil to each other, it was not possible that there could be any true harmony or friendship between them.