“Now since I have been on your part informed of the sentence of your last meeting of Parliament, Lord Buckhurst and Beale have admonished me to prepare for the end of my long and weary pilgrimage, I beg to return you thanks on my part for these happy tidings, and to entreat you to vouchsafe to me certain points for the discharge of my conscience. But since Sir Amias Paulet has informed me (though falsely) that you had indulged me by having restored to me my almoner and the money that they had taken from me, and that the remainder would follow; for all this I would willingly return you thanks, and supplicate still further as a last request, which I have thought for many reasons I ought to ask of you alone, that you will accord this ultimate grace for which I should not like to be indebted to any other, since I have no hope of finding aught but cruelty from the Puritans, who are at this time, God knows wherefore, the first in authority and the most bitter against me. “I will accuse no one: nay, I pardon with a sincere heart everyone even as I desire everyone may grant forgiveness to me, God the first. But I know that you more than anyone ought to feel at heart the honour or dishonour of your own blood, and that moreover of a Queen and the daughter of a King. “Thus, madam, for the sake of that Jesus to whose name all powers bow, I require you to ordain that when my enemies have slaked their black thirst for my innocent blood, you will permit my poor desolate servants altogether to carry away my body to bury it in holy ground with the other queens of France my predecessors, especially near the late Queen my mother; having this in recollection, that in Scotland the bodies of the kings my predecessors have been outraged and the churches profaned and abolished; and that as I shall suffer in this country I shall not be given place near the kings your predecessors, who are mine as well as yours; for, according to our religion, we think much of being interred in holy ground. As they tell me that you will in nothing force my conscience nor my religion, and have even conceded me a priest, refuse me not this, my last request, that you will permit free sepulture to this body when the soul is separated, which when united could never obtain liberty to live in repose such as you would procure for yourself—against which repose, before God I speak, _I never aimed a blow_: but God will let you see the truth of all after my death.