"Thy confession is but a brief record of the fact, as the Clerk of the Crown will presently read. There is neither circumstance nor detail." "And is it for circumstance or detail that I am being tried?" rejoined Wessex, "or for the murder of Don Miguel de Suarez, to which I hereby plead guilty?" The Queen's Serjeant looked to Sir Robert Catline for guidance. The Lord Chief Justice, however, was of opinion that the prisoner's confession must be read first, before any further argument about it could be allowed. The Clerk of the Crown then rose and began to read:-- "The voluntary confession of Robert Duke of Wessex, now a prisoner in the Tower, and accused of murder, treason, and felony: made at the Tower of London on the fifteenth day of October, 1553. I hereby acknowledge and confess that on the fourteenth day of October I did unlawfully kill Don Miguel, Marquis de Suarez, by stabbing him in the back with my dagger. For this murder I plead neither excuse nor justification, and submit myself to a trial by my peers and to the justice of this realm. So help me God." The bench, the entire hall, was crowded with the Duke's friends; with the exception of a very small faction, who for reasons they deemed good and adequate desired the Spanish alliance, and the death of the man at the bar, not a single man or woman present believed that that confession was an exposé of the truth. The Serjeant himself, the Clerk of the Crown, the Attorney and Solicitor-General who represented the prosecution, knew that some mystery lurked behind that monstrous self-accusation. But it was so straightforward, so categorical, that unless some extraordinary event occurred, unless Wessex himself recanted that confession, nothing could save him from its dire consequences. Oh! if Wessex would but recant! No one would have disbelieved him then--not that fickle, motley crowd surely, who with its own characteristic inconsequence had suddenly taken the accused to its heart. "'Tis not true, Wessex!" shouted a manly voice from the body of the hall. "Deny it! deny it!" came in a regular hubbub from the compact mass of throats in the rear. The Duke smiled, but did not move. Lord Rich, in his memoirs, here points out that "His Grace seemed all unconscious of his surroundings and like unto a wanderer in the land of dreams." But the confession had aroused the opposition of the crowd, it was truly past honest men's belief. Every one murmured, and some chroniclers aver that there was a regular tumult, more than encouraged by the Duke's friends, and not checked even by the Lord High Steward himself. In the turn of a hand public opinion had veered round. Forgetting that a while ago they were ready to hoot and mock the prisoner, the men now were equally prepared to make a rush for the bar and drag him away from that ignominious place, which they suddenly understood that he never should have occupied.