r reflection, when alarm had subsided and the
bitterness of satiated revenge had begun to make itself felt,--these
"compunctious visitings" could have led to no consequences capable of
alarming her. It must have been felt as highly inequitable to reproach
the queen, when all was past and irrevocable, for the consent which she
had afforded to a deed sanctioned by a law, ratified by the legislature
and applauded by the people, and from which both church and state had
reaped the fruits of security and peace. Foreign princes also would have
respected the vigor of this proceeding; they would not have been
displeased to see themselves spared by a decisive act the pain of making
disregarded representations on such a subject; and a secret
consciousness that few of their number would have scrupled under all the
circumstances to take like vengeance on a deadly foe and rival, might
further have contributed to reconcile them to the fact. Even as it was,
pope Sixtus V. himself could scarcely restrain his expressions of
admiration at the completion of so strong a measure as the final
execution of the sentence: his holiness had indeed a strange passion for
capital punishments, and he is said to have envied the queen of England
the glorious satisfaction of cutting off a royal head:--a sentiment not
much more extraordinary from such a personage, than the ardent desire
which he is reported to have expressed, that it were possible for him to
have a son by this heretic princess; because the offspring of such
parents could not fail, he said, to make himself king of the world.

But it was the weakness of Elizabeth to imagine, that an extraordinary
parade of reluctance, and the interposition of some affected delays,
would change in public opinion the whole character of the deed which she
contemplated, and preserve to her the reputation of feminine mildness
and sensibility, without the sacrifice of that great revenge on which
she was secretly bent. The world, however, when it has no interest in
deceiving itself, is too wise to accept of words instead of deeds, or in
opposition to them; and the sole result of her artifices was to
aggravate in the eyes of all mankind the criminality of the act, by
giving it rather the air of a treacherous and cold-blooded murder, than
of solemn execution done upon a formidable culprit by the sentence of
offended laws. The parliament which Elizabeth had summoned to partake
the odium of Mary's death, met four days