anted. Moreover if contemporary chronicle can be trusted he even
expressed a preference for the scaffold, as the milder fate of the two.
The lady, however, not being aware of those uncomplimentary sentiments,
made her proposal to the magistrates, but was dismissed with harsh
rebukes. She had need be ashamed, they said; of her willingness to take a
condemned traitor for her husband. It was urged, in her behalf, that even
in the cruel Alva's time, the ancient custom had been respected, and that
victims had been saved from the executioners, on a demand in marriage
made even by women of abandoned character. But all was of no avail. The
prisoners were executed on the 26th October, the same day on which the
sentence had been pronounced. The heads of Volmar and Cosmo were exposed
on one of the turrets of the city. That of Maulde was interred with his
body.

The Earl was indignant when he heard of the event. As there had been no
written proof of his complicity in the conspiracy, the judges had thought
it improper to mention his name in the sentences. He, of course, denied
any knowledge of the plot, and its proof rested therefore only on the
assertion of the prisoners themselves, which, however, was
circumstantial, voluntary, and generally believed!

France, during the whole of this year of expectation, was ploughed
throughout its whole surface by perpetual civil war. The fatal edict of
June, 1585, had drowned the unhappy land in blood. Foreign armies, called
in by the various contending factions, ravaged its-fair territory,
butchered its peasantry, and changed its fertile plains to a wilderness.
The unhappy creature who wore the crown of Charlemagne and of Hugh Capet,
was but the tool in the hands of the most profligate and designing of his
own subjects, and of foreigners. Slowly and surely the net, spread by the
hands of his own mother, of his own prime minister, of the Duke of Guise,
all obeying the command and receiving the stipend of Philip, seemed
closing over him. He was without friends, without power to know his
friends, if he had them. In his hatred to the Reformation, he had allowed
himself to be made the enemy of the only man who could be his friend, or
the friend of France. Allied with his mortal foe, whose armies were
strengthened by contingents from Parma's forces, and paid for by Spanish
gold, he was forced to a mock triumph over the foreign mercenaries who
came to save his crown, and to submit to the defeat of th