Could anyone suppose that this momentous proceeding was going on without the knowledge of the English Queen? Such a supposition would be impossible. Walsingham was a daily visitor at court and Elizabeth's paid secretary. It would have been as much as his life was worth to negotiate this diabolical plot unknown to his mistress, and particularly as every movement in connection with the Queen of Scots had to be communicated to her. It was a case where she reserved to herself exclusively the privilege of giving every order, with no intention whatever of consulting her responsible ministers or her Privy Council. In this particular matter they were merely figureheads. Walsingham, therefore, whose character we have already described, was in this case nothing but a puppet in the hands of a powerful and unscrupulous woman, stronger than himself. If he had an audience of her daily no correspondence between them would be necessary. The spies employed were Walsingham's servants. Their object was to inveigle Mary into a crime that was punishable with death. Walsingham having failed to get Babington's consent to Elizabeth's assassination, and thereby compromise the Scottish Queen, evidently resolved on the other alternative, and manufactured the material which Phillips introduced into the letters. The circumstantial evidence is too strong to permit of Elizabeth's escape from the responsibility. The actual extent to which she was compromised we shall probably never know, but it is a fair and reasonable deduction from the correspondence, as now disclosed, to say that she and Walsingham were responsible for connecting Mary with the plot against her life. There is no proof against Mary that will stand investigation, and no proof at all save forged and interpolated letters (see pp. 228-40). It was, in plain language, a cunning plot by Elizabeth against Elizabeth to encompass the Scottish Queen in a false conspiracy against her life. [Illustration: SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM, Secretary to Queen Elizabeth.]