d of which the countess of Hertford was delivered soon after her
committal, was regarded as illegitimate, and she was doomed to expiate
her pretended misconduct by a further imprisonment at the arbitrary
pleasure of the queen. The birth of a second child, the fruit of stolen
meetings between the captive pair, aggravated in the jealous eyes of
Elizabeth their common guilt. Warner lost his place for permitting or
conniving at their interviews, and Hertford was sentenced in the
Star-chamber to a fine of fifteen thousand pounds for the double offence
of vitiating a female of the royal blood, and of breaking his prison to
renew his offence.

It might somewhat console this persecuted pair under all their
sufferings, to learn how unanimously the public voice was in their
favor. No one doubted that they were lawfully married,--a fact which was
afterwards fully established,--and it was asked, by what right, or on
what principle, her majesty presumed to keep asunder those whom God had
joined? Words ran so high on this subject after the sentence of the
Star-chamber, that some alarmists in the privy-council urged the
necessity of inflicting still severer punishment on the earl, and of
intimidating the talkers by strong measures. The further consequences of
this affair to persons high in her majesty's confidence will be related
hereafter: meantime it must be recorded, to the eternal disgrace of
Elizabeth's character and government, that she barbarously and illegally
detained her ill-fated kinswoman, first in the Tower and afterwards in
private custody, till the day of her death in January 1567; and that the
earl her husband, having added to the original offence of marrying a
princess, the further presumption of placing upon legal record the
proofs of his children's legitimacy, was punished, besides his fine,
with an imprisonment of nine whole years. So much of the jealous spirit
of her grandfather still survived in the bosom of this last of the
Tudors!

On another occasion, however, she exercised towards a family whose
pretensions had been viewed by her father with peculiar dread and
hostility, a degree of forbearance which had in it somewhat of
magnanimity.

Arthur and Edmund Pole, two nephews of the cardinal, with sir Anthony
Fortescue their sister's husband, and other accomplices, had been led,
either by private ambition, by a vehement zeal for the Romish faith, or
both together, to meditate the subversion of the existing stat