conscience as to have laid any
plan for her destruction, or even to have resolved upon hazarding the
attempt. The case therefore was one in which mercy and even justice seem
to have required the remission of a harsh and hasty sentence; but the
panic terror which had now seized the queen, the ministry, the
parliament, and the nation, would have sufficed to overpower the
pleadings of the generous virtues in hearts of nobler mould than those
of Elizabeth, of Leicester, or of Walsingham.

Nevil, the accuser of Parry, far from gaining any reward, was detained
prisoner in the Tower certainly till the year 1588, and whether he even
then obtained his liberation does not appear.

The severe enactments of the new parliament against papists, which
included a total prohibition of every exercise of the rites of their
religion, so affected the mind of Philip Howard earl of Arundel, already
exasperated by the personal hardships to which the suspicions of her
majesty and the hostility of her ministers had exposed him, that he
formed the resolution of banishing himself for ever from his native
land. Having secretly prepared every thing for his departure, he put his
whole case upon record in a letter addressed to her majesty, and left
behind at his house in London. This piece ought, as it appears, to have
excited in the breast of his sovereign sentiments of regret and
compunction rather than of indignation. The writer complains, that
without any offence given on his part, or even objected against him by
her majesty, he had long since fallen into her disfavor, as by her
"bitter speeches" had become publicly known; so that he was generally
accounted, "nay in a manner pointed at," as one whom her majesty least
favored, and in most disgrace as a person whom she did deeply suspect
and especially mislike." That after he had continued for some months
under this cloud, he had been called sundry times by her command before
the council, where charges had been brought against him, some of them
ridiculously trifling, others incredible, all so untrue, that even his
greatest enemies could not, after his answers were made, reproach him
with any disloyal thought;--yet was he in the end ordered to keep his
house. That his enemies still continued to pursue him with
interrogatories, and continued his restraint; and that even after the
last examination had failed to produce any thing against him, he was
still kept fifteen weeks longer in the same state, th