“My good cousin, if God do not help you to find means of aiding your poor cousin, it is all over this time. The bearer will tell you how they treat me and my two secretaries. For God's sake help and save them if you can. We are accused of having wished to disturb the State, and of having practised against the life of the Queen or consented to it; but I have asserted what is true, that I know nothing of it. It is said that some letters have been seized in the possession of one Babington, one Charles Paget, and his brother, which testify to the conspiracy, and that Nau and Curle have confessed it. I maintain that they could not do so unless more than they know were forced out of them by means of torture.” (This confession was the result of the rack.) Pasquier or de Pasquier, a literary friend and follower of Mary, was apprehended along with Nau and Curle for no reason whatever, and very shortly after that event he was brought before the Lord Chancellor to see what secret information about Mary they could possibly draw out of him. As he was in reality a member of Mary's household, Elizabeth's ministers were sanguine that they would get important information. In that, however, they were disappointed, as Pasquier was able to keep his own counsel. On 2nd September 1586 he appeared before the Lord Chancellor, when the following interrogatories were put to him, but we have no answers recorded. These cunning questions were in the interest of Elizabeth, and constitute a mean attempt on the part of Bromley to drag the Scottish Queen into trouble:— “Whether he has been at any time acquainted with the practice for the setting of the Scottish Queen at liberty? “Whether he has not been made acquainted with some practice within the realm of disposing the hearts of Catholics to join with such foreign forces as should invade the realm? “Whether he has not within these four or five months written letters to certain persons in foreign parts to show how the Catholics of this realm stood affected with them? “What practice he has been made acquainted with in these three months prejudicial to Her Majesty's State or person? “How he knoweth that the Queen of Scots has had her secret letters carried or brought to her?” In the midst of these negotiations Walsingham appears to have had another subject on hand: this was the relations between Mary and her son.