“As to that,” replied Mary Stuart, “it is another matter, and I do not deny it; and if it was again to do, I should do as I have done, to gain my liberty; for there is not a man or woman in the world, of less rank than I, who would not do it, and who would not make use of the help and succour of their friends to issue from a captivity as harsh as mine was.  You charge me with certain letters from Babington:  well, I do not deny that he has written to me and that I have replied to him; but if you find in my answers a single word about the queen my sister, well, yes, there will be good cause to prosecute me.  I replied to him who wrote to me that he would set me at liberty, that I accepted his offer, if he could do it without compromising the one or the other of us:  that is all.

“As to my secretaries,” added the queen, “not they, but torture spoke by their mouths:  and as to the confessions of Babington and his accomplices, there is not much to be made of them; for now that they are dead you can say all that seems good to you; and let who will believe you.”

With these words, the queen refused to answer further if she were not given counsel, and, renewing her protestation, she withdrew into her apartment; but, as the chancellor had threatened, the trial was continued despite her absence.

However, M. de Chateauneuf, the French ambassador to London, saw matters too near at hand to be deceived as to their course:  accordingly, at the first rumour which came to him of bringing Mary Stuart to trial, he wrote to King Henry iii, that he might intervene in the prisoner’s favour.  Henry iii immediately despatched to Queen Elizabeth an embassy extraordinary, of which M. de Bellievre was the chief; and at the same time, having learned that James vi, Mary’s son, far from interesting himself in his mother’s fate, had replied to the French minister, Courcelles, who spoke to him of her, “I can do nothing; let her drink what she has spilled,” he wrote him the following letter, to decide the young prince to second him in the steps he was going to take: 

“21st November, 1586.

“Courcelles, I have received your letter of the 4th October last, in which I have seen the discourse that the King of Scotland has held with you concerning what you have witnessed to him of the good affection I bear him, discourse in which he has given proof of desiring to reciprocate it entirely; but I wish that that letter had informed me also that he was better disposed towards the queen his mother, and that he had the heart and the desire to arrange everything in a way to assist her in the affliction in which she now is, reflecting that the prison where she has been unjustly detained for eighteen years and more has induced her to lend an ear to many things which have been proposed to her for gaining her liberty, a thing which is naturally greatly desired by all men, and more still by those who are born sovereigns and