As she neared the scaffold she called to her _maître d’hôtel_ and said, “Help me to mount; it is the last service I shall receive from you;” and she repeated to him what she had already told him in her chamber he was to tell her son. Then, being on the scaffold, she asked for her almoner, begging the officers who were there to permit him to come to her, which they flatly refused,--the Earl of Kent saying to her that he pitied her greatly for thus clinging to superstitions of a past age, and that she ought to bear the cross of Christ in her heart and not in her hand. To which she made answer that it was difficult to bear so beautiful an image in the hand without the heart being touched by emotion and memory; and that the most becoming thing in a Christian person was to carry a real sign of the redemption to the death before her. Then, seeing that she could not have her almoner, she asked that her women might come as they had promised her; which was done. One of them, on entering the hall, seeing her mistress on the scaffold among her executioners, could not keep from crying out and moaning and losing her control; but the queen instantly laying her finger on her lips, she restrained herself. Her Majesty then began to make her protestations, namely: that never had she plotted against the State, nor against the life of the queen, her good sister,--except in trying to regain her liberty, as all captives may. But she saw plainly that the cause of her death was religion, and she esteemed herself very happy to finish her life for that cause. She begged the queen, her good sister, to have pity upon her poor servants whom she held captive, because of the affection they had shown in seeking the liberty of their mistress, inasmuch as she was now to die for all. They then brought to her a minister to exhort her [the Dean of Peterborough], but she said to him in English, “Ah! my friend, give yourself patience;” declaring that she would not hold converse with him nor hear any talk of his sect, for she had prepared herself to die without counsel, and that persons like him could not give her consolation or contentment of mind. Notwithstanding this, seeing that he continued his prayers in his jargon, she never ceased to say her own in Latin, raising her voice above that of the minister. After which she said again that she esteemed herself very happy to shed the last drop of her blood for her religion, rather than live longer and wait till nature had completed the full course of her life; and that she hoped in Him whose cross she held in her hand, before whose feet she was prostrate, that this temporal death, borne for Him, would be for her the passage, the entrance to, and the beginning of life eternal with the angels and the blessèd, who would receive her blood and present it before God, in abolition of her sins; and them she prayed to be her intercessors for the obtaining of pardon and mercy.