e token of her
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.[**] The purport of them was, that human justice was against his
body, but divine mercy would be favorable to his soul; that if her fault
deserved punishment, her youth at least, and her imprudence, were worthy
of excuse; and that God and posterity, she trusted, would show her
favor.

* Heylin, p. 167. Baker p. 319.

** Heylin, p. 167.

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. She said, that her offence was not the having laid her
hand upon the crown, but the not rejecting it with sufficient constancy;
that she had less erred through ambition than through reverence to
her parents, whom she had been taught to respect and obey: that she
willingly received death, as the only satisfaction which she could now
make to the injured state; and though her infringement of the laws had
been constrained, she would show, by her voluntary submission to their
sentence, that she was desirous to atone for that disobedience into
which too much filial piety had betrayed her: that she had 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.[*]

The duke of Suffolk was tried, condemned, and executed soon after; and
would have met with more compassion, had not his temerity been the cause
of his daughter's untimely