he earl
pleaded Not guilty; but afterwards, in his defence, confessed some of
them, though with certain extenuations. He asserted, that the prayers
and masses which he had caused to be said, were for the averting of a
general massacre of the English catholics, alleged to be designed; and
not for the success of the armada. The aid to the catholic cause, which
he had promised in his correspondence with cardinal Allen, he declared
to refer only to peaceful attempts at making converts, not to the
encouragement of any plan of rebellion. He acknowledged a design of
going to serve under the prince of Parma, since he was denied the
exercise of his religion at home; but he argued his innocence of any
view of cooperating in plans of invasion, from the circumstance, that
his attempt to leave England had taken place during the year fixed by
cardinal Allen and the queen of Scots for the execution of a scheme of
this nature.

The crown-lawyers, in order to make out a case of constructive treason,
urged the reconcilement of the prisoner with the church of Rome, which
they held to be of itself a traitorous act; his correspondence with
declared traitors; and the high opinion entertained of him by the queen
of Scots and cardinal Allen, as the chief support of popery in England.
They likewise exhibited an emblematical picture found in his house,
representing in one part a hand shaking off a viper into the fire, with
the motto, "If God is for us who can be against us?" and in another part
a lion, the cognisance of the Howard family, deprived of his claws,
under him the words, "Yet still a lion." On these charges, none of
which, though proved by the most unexceptionable witnesses, could bring
him within the true meaning of the old statute of Edward III., on which
he was indicted, the peers were base enough to pronounce an unanimous
verdict of Guilty; which he received, as his father had done before him,
with the words "God's will be done!" But here the queen felt herself
concerned in honor to interpose. It had ever been her maxim and her
boast, to punish none capitally for religious delinquencies unconnected
with traitorous designs; and sensible probably how imperfectly in this
case the latter had been proved, she was pleased, in her abundant mercy,
to commute the capital part of the sentence against her unhappy kinsman
for perpetual imprisonment, attended with the forfeiture of the greater
part of his estate.

In 1595, this victim of the