d
all our posterities: For reformation and remedy hereof, we, your most
bounden and loving subjects, most obediently acknowledging that your
Majesty, prudently, victoriously, politicly, and indifferently, hath
maintained this realm in peace and quietness during all the time of your
most gracious reign, putting our trust and confidence in your Highness,
and nothing doubting but that your Majesty, if you should fail of heirs
lawfully begotten, for the love and affection that ye bear to this
realm, and for avoiding all the occasions of divisions afore rehearsed,
so earnestly mindeth the wealth of the same, that ye can best and most
prudently provide such a governour for us and this your realm, as will
succeed and follow in the just and right tract of all your proceedings,
and maintain, keep, and defend the same and all the laws and ordinances
established in your Grace's time for the wealth of the realm, which we
all desire, do therefore most humbly beseech your Highness, that it may
be enacted, for avoiding all ambiguities, doubts, and divisions, that
your Highness shall have full and plenary power and authority to
dispose, by your letters patent under your great seal, or else by your
last will made in writing, and signed with your hand, the imperial crown
of this realm, and all other the premises thereunto belonging, to such
person or persons as shall please your Highness.

"And we, your humble and obedient subjects, do faithfully promise to
your Majesty, by one common assent, that after your decease, we, our
heirs and successors, shall accept and take, love, dread, and only obey
such person or persons, male or female, as your Majesty shall give your
imperial crown unto; and wholly to stick to them as true and faithful
subjects ought to do."[624]

NOTES:

[536] Speech of the Lord Chancellor: _Lords' Journals_, p. 84

[537] Strype's _Memorials_, Vol. I. p. 370.

[538] Sir Edmund Bedingfield to Cromwell: _State Papers_, Vol. I. p.
451.

[539] Strype's _Memorials_, Vol. I.; and see Appendix, p. 241, et seq.

[540] _State Papers_, Vol. I. p. 452

[541] Lord Herbert, p. 188.

[542] Lord Herbert, p. 188. It will have been observed, that neither in
this letter, nor in the other authentic papers connected with her death,
is there any allusion to Cardinal Pole's famous story, that being on her
deathbed, Queen Catherine prayed the king to allow her to see her
daughter for the last time, and that the request was refused