received the signatures of the three nobles above
mentioned and the rest of the confederates. By these subscribers it was
distinctly stipulated, that the union should not take place without the
knowledge and approbation of the queen of England, and that the reformed
religion should be maintained in both the British kingdoms;--conditions
by which they at first perhaps believed that they had provided
sufficiently for the interests of Elizabeth and of protestantism: it was
however immediately obvious that the duke and his agents had the design
of concealing carefully all their measures from their sovereign, till
the party should have gained such strength that it would no longer be
safe for her to refuse a consent which it was well known that she would
always be unwilling to grant.

But when, on encouragement being given by Mary to the hopes of her
suitor, the kings of France and Spain, and even the Pope himself, were
made privy to the scheme and pledged to give it their assistance, all
its English, and especially all its protestant supporters, ought to have
been aware that their undertaking was assuming the form of a conspiracy
with the enemies of their queen and country against her government and
personal safety; against the public peace, and the religion by law
established; and nothing can excuse the blindness, or palliate the
guilt, of their perseverance in a course so perilous and so crooked.

Private interests were doubtless at the bottom with most or all of the
participators in this affair who were not papists; and those,--they were
not a few,--who envied or who feared the influence and authority of
Cecil, eagerly seized the occasion to array against him a body of
hostility by which they trusted to work his final and irretrievable
ruin.

It seems to have been by an ambitious rivalry with the secretary, that
sir Nicholas Throgmorton, whose early life had exhibited so bold a
spirit of resistance to tyranny and popery when triumphant and
enthroned, had been carried into a faction which all his principles
ought to have rendered odious to him. In his intercourses with the queen
of Scots as ambassador from Elizabeth, he had already shown himself her
zealous partisan. In advising her to sign for her safety the deed of
abdication tendered to her at Loch-Leven, he had basely suggested that
the compulsion under which she acted would excuse her from regarding it
as binding: to the English crown he also regarded her future ti