It had been intended to execute the Lady Jane and Lord Guildford together on the same scaffold at Tower Hill; but the council, dreading the compassion of the people for their youth, beauty, innocence, and noble birth, changed their orders, and gave directions that she should be beheaded within the verge of the Tower. She saw her husband led to execution, and, having given him from the window some token of remembrance, she waited with tranquillity till her own appointed hour should bring her to a like fate. She even saw his headless body carried back in a cart, and found herself more confirmed by the reports which she heard of the constancy of his end, than shaken by so tender and melancholy a spectacle. Sir John Gage, constable of the Tower, when he led her to execution, desired her to bestow on him some small present which he might keep as a perpetual memorial of her. She gave him her table-book, on which she had just written three sentences on seeing her husband's dead body--one in Greek, another in Latin, a third in English. On the scaffold she made a speech to the bystanders, in which the mildness of her disposition led her to take the blame wholly on herself, without uttering one complaint against the severity with which she had been treated; that she justly deserved this punishment for being made the instrument, though the unwilling instrument, of the ambition of others; and that the story of her life, she hoped, might at least be useful, by proving that innocence excuses not great misdeeds, if they tend anywise to the destruction of the commonwealth. After uttering these words, she caused herself to be disrobed by her women, and, with a steady serene countenance, submitted herself to the executioner. TARQUINIA MOLZA. [1600.] HILARION DE COSTE.