their Queen and for having wished to dispossess her. I answered that I was not so presuming as to aspire to these two honours, but whilst they had power over my body by divine permission, not by justice, I was a Sovereign Queen, as I had always protested. Still they had not power over my soul, nor could they prevent me from hoping that by the mercy of God who died for me He will accept from me my blood and my life, which I offer Him for the welfare of His Church. Besides, neither here nor elsewhere would I wish to rule over a worldly kingdom and thereby lose the eternal kingdom. And I shall beg of Him that the grief and other persecutions of mind and body which I suffer may be set against my sins. _But to have conspired, counselled, or ordered Elizabeth's death, that I have never done_; nor would I permit on my part that even one single blow [one snap of the fingers is the original] should be given her. Oh! said they, you have counselled and permitted the English to name you as their Sovereign, as appears by the letters to Alan, and Doctors Lewis and others, and this you have not contradicted; to which I answered that I had taken nothing upon myself in my letters, but hindering the doctors and ecclesiastics from naming me at their pleasure was not my province, being obedient to the Church, approving what she decreed but not correcting her. And I said the same in regard to His Holiness if, as they declared, he made me be prayed for everywhere under a title of which I was ignorant. In any case, I wished to die and to obey the Church, but not to murder anyone in order to possess his rights. In all this I saw clearly the pursuit of Saul against David, but I cannot escape like him by the window, although from the shedding of my blood protectors may arise for the sufferers in this general quarrel. In short, the day before yesterday Paulet returned with Drury much more modest than gracious, to tell me that, having been warned to prepare myself to confess my fault towards the Queen, I had shown no repentance nor feeling of my fault, and he had therefore commanded that they should take away my daïs in order to signify that I was a woman who had died without any honour or dignity as Queen. I answered that God had called me by His grace to this dignity, and I had been anointed and consecrated justly, and that from Him alone I held it, to Him alone should I render it with my soul; that I did not recognise their Queen as my superior nor her council and heretical assembly as my judges; that I should die Queen in spite of them, and that they had no more power over me than robbers at the corner of a wood had over the most just prince or earthly judge, but I hoped that God would show His justice after my death upon this kingdom. The kings of this country had often been murdered, and it would not be strange for me to be amongst them and those of their blood. King Richard had been treated thus in order to take away his rights.