was a serious danger to the government, and the imperial ambassadors urged that the Princess should be banished from London, where she was surrounded by partisans, and if she would not conform to the Catholic faith, it would be better for her to be in prison than out of it. Mary, loth to coerce, tried to persuade her by the force of example, and would hear five or six Masses daily, surrounded by the members of her Privy Council, all of whom had been, till recently, ardent Protestants.[337] Elizabeth and Anne of Cleves were the only persons at court who still held out. At last, alarmed at the sinister reports that reached her, Mary told her sister, that if she wished to remain near her person, she must break with the new doctrines, and with those who professed them. Considering then, that she had done enough to exculpate herself in the eyes of those who had been carefully taught to look on her as their Joshua, Elizabeth threw herself at the Queen’s feet, and with streaming eyes expressed her sorrow at having seemingly lost her Majesty’s affection. She could account for it, she declared, in no other way than her profession of the reformed religion, for which, however, she ought to be excused, as having been brought up in it, and never taught any other. Perhaps, she pleaded, if she were provided with books, and aided by the instructions of divines, she might see her errors, and embrace the religion of her fathers. Her conversion was the work of a week. She went to Mass with the Queen, on the 8th September, and soon after, opened a chapel in her own house, and sent to Flanders for a chalice, cross and vestments.[338] De Noailles, without laying claim to great sagacity, might well express his opinion that all this proceeded more from policy than from any deep religious conviction. Up to the last moment before going to Mass, Elizabeth did all she could to persuade her Protestant friends that she was merely acting under compulsion. Even on her way to the chapel, she sighed and groaned, and gave out that she was ill. Renard too, doubted the sincerity of her conversion, especially as she did not appear at Mass on the Sundays following, and he besought the Queen to secure her person, as a frequenter and abettor of rebels. Mary assured him that she had also had grave misgivings, had already sent for her sister and implored her to say frankly whether she was a Catholic and shared the Catholic belief in the Eucharist, or whether, as it had been affirmed, her conversion were a feint or the result of fear. Elizabeth, the Queen said, had professed herself ready to declare in public that she had acted in accordance with the dictates of her conscience, without feint, fear or dissimulation; but in saying these words she had trembled from head to foot.[339] Renard and his colleagues continued to regard her as the champion of the disaffected, and were careful to bring to the Queen’s notice the persistent rumours concerning her.