When the earls had left her, she ordered supper to be hastened, that she might have the more leisure after it to finish the few affairs which remained to her in this world, and to prepare for her passage to another. It was necessary for her, she said, to take some sustenance, lest a failure of her bodily strength should depress her spirits on the morrow, and lest her behavior should thereby betray a weakness unworthy of herself.[*] She supped sparingly, as her manner usually was; and her wonted cheerfulness did not even desert her on this occasion. She comforted her servants under the affliction which overwhelmed them, and which was too violent for them to conceal it from her. Turning to Burgoin, her physician, she asked him, whether he did not remark the great and invincible force of truth. “They pretend,” said she, “that I must die, because I conspired against their queen’s life: but the earl of Kent avowed, that there was no other cause of my death, than the apprehensions which, if I should live, they entertain for their religion. My constancy in the faith is my real crime: the rest is only a color, invented by interested and designing men.” Towards the end of supper, she called in all her servants, and drank to them: they pledged her, in order, on their knees; and craved her pardon for any past neglect of their duty: she deigned, in return, to ask their pardon for her offences towards them; and a plentiful effusion of tears attended this last solemn farewell, and exchange of mutual forgiveness.[**] * Jebb, vol. ii. p. 489. ** Jebb, vol. ii. p. 302, 626. Camden, p. 534. Mary’s care of her servants was the sole remaining affair which employed her concern. She perused her will, in which she had provided for them by legacies: she ordered the inventory of her goods, clothes, and jewels to be brought her: and she wrote down the names of those to whom she bequeathed each particular: to some she distributed money with her own hands; and she adapted the recompense to their different degrees of rank and merit. She wrote also letters of recommendation for her servants to the French king, and to her cousin the duke of Guise, whom she made the chief executor of her testament. At her wonted time, she went to bed; slept some hours; and, then rising, spent the rest of the night in prayer. Having foreseen the difficulty of exercising the rites of her religion, she had had the precaution to obtain a consecrated host from the hands of Pope Pius; and she had reserved the use of it for this last period of her life. By this expedient she supplied, as much as she could, the want of a priest and confessor, who was refused her.[*] * Jebb, vol. ii. p, 489.