“I entreat your Holiness to impetrate from the most Christian King that my jointure may be charged with the payment of my debts and the wages of my poor desolate servants, and with an annual obit for my soul and those of all my brethren deceased in this just quarrel; having had no other private intention, as my poor servants present at this my affliction will testify to you, and how I have willingly offered my life in their heretical assembly to maintain my religion, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman, and bring back the devout of this island; protesting in this case that I would willingly demit all title and dignity of Queen, and do all service and duty to theirs, if she would cease to persecute the Catholics, as I protest that this is the object at which I have aimed since I have been in this country, and have no ambition or desire to reign or dispossess others for my own sake, being by sickness and long affliction so weakened that I have no more desire to trouble myself in this world than with the service of His Church and the gaining of the souls of this island to God. For evidence of which at my end I would not fail to prefer the public safety to the private interest of flesh and blood, which makes me beseech you, with a mortal regret for the perdition of my poor child, after having by all means endeavoured to retrieve him, being to him a true father as St. John the Evangelist was to the youth whom he recalled from the company of the robbers, to take at last all the authority over him which I can give you to constrain him, and to call on the Catholic King to assist you in what relates to temporal matters, and especially together to endeavour to unite him by marriage. And if God for my sins permits him to be obstinate, knowing no Christian prince at this time who exerts himself so much for the faith, nor possesses such means of assisting in the reduction of this island, as the Catholic King to whom I am so much indebted, he being the only one who has assisted me with his money and advice in my necessities, under your good pleasure I leave him all the rights or interest which I can have in the government of this kingdom. Should my son remain obstinately out of the Church; whom if he can be brought back I desire to be by him and my kinsmen of Guise assisted, supported, and advised, enjoining him by my last will to consider them after you as fathers, and to ally himself by their advice and consent and with one of these two houses, and if it should please God I wish him worthy to be a son of the Catholic King. You shall have the true recital of the manner of my last struggle and all the proceedings against me and by me, so that, knowing the truth, the calumnies which the enemies of the Church would fasten on me may be by you refuted and the truth known.[13] “MARIE R.” Queen Mary at the same time wrote to the Duke of Guise, Fotheringay, 23rd Nov. 1586:—