a maidenly
shamefacedness, than upon any such certain determination[30]."

[Note 30: The hint of "some honorable marriage" in the above letter,
has been supposed to refer to the duke of Savoy; but if the date
inscribed upon the copy which is found among the Harleian MSS. be
correct (April 26th 1558), this could not well be; since the queen,
early in the preceding year, had declined to interfere further in his
behalf.]

This letter appears to have been the last transaction which occurred
between Mary and Elizabeth: from it, and from the whole of the notices
relative to the situation of the latter thrown together in the preceding
pages, it may be collected, that during the three last years of her
sister's reign,--the period, namely, of her residence at Hatfield,--she
had few privations, and no personal hardships to endure: but for
individuals whom she esteemed, for principles to which her conscience
secretly inclined, for her country which she truly loved, her
apprehensions must have been continually excited, and too often
justified by events the most cruel and disastrous.

The reestablishment, by solemn acts of the legislature, of the Romish
ritual and the papal authority, though attended with the entire
prohibition of all protestant worship, was not sufficient for the
bigotry of Mary. Aware that the new doctrines still found harbour in the
bosoms of her subjects, she sought to drag them by her violence from
this last asylum; for to her, as to all tyrants, it appeared both
desirable and possible to subject the liberty of thinking to the
regulation and control of human laws.

By virtue of her authority as head of the English church,--a title
which the murmurs of her parliament had compelled her against her
conscience to resume after laying it aside for some time,--she issued an
ecclesiastical commission, which wanted nothing of the Spanish
inquisition but the name. The commissioners were empowered to call
before them the leading men in every parish of the kingdom, and to
compel them to bind themselves by oath to give information against such
of their neighbours as, by abstaining from attendance at church or other
symptoms of disaffection to the present order of things, afforded room
to doubt the soundness of their belief. Articles of faith were then
offered to the suspected persons for their signature, and on their
simple refusal they were handed over to the civil power, and fire and
faggot awaited them. By this barb