Intelligence was brought to the prisoner in his dungeon, that the young, lady had made the proposition, and he was told to be of good cheer:  But he refused to be comforted.  He was slightly acquainted with the gentle-woman, he observed; and doubted much whether her request would be granted.  Moreover if contemporary chronicle can be trusted he even expressed a preference for the scaffold, as the milder fate of the two.  The lady, however, not being aware of those uncomplimentary sentiments, made her proposal to the magistrates, but was dismissed with harsh rebukes.  She had need be ashamed, they said; of her willingness to take a condemned traitor for her husband.  It was urged, in her behalf, that even in the cruel Alva’s time, the ancient custom had been respected, and that victims had been saved from the executioners, on a demand in marriage made even by women of abandoned character.  But all was of no avail.  The prisoners were executed on the 26th October, the same day on which the sentence had been pronounced.  The heads of Volmar and Cosmo were exposed on one of the turrets of the city.  That of Maulde was interred with his body.

The Earl was indignant when he heard of the event.  As there had been no written proof of his complicity in the conspiracy, the judges had thought it improper to mention his name in the sentences.  He, of course, denied any knowledge of the plot, and its proof rested therefore only on the assertion of the prisoners themselves, which, however, was circumstantial, voluntary, and generally believed!

France, during the whole of this year of expectation, was ploughed throughout its whole surface by perpetual civil war.  The fatal edict of June, 1585, had drowned the unhappy land in blood.  Foreign armies, called in by the various contending factions, ravaged its-fair territory, butchered its peasantry, and changed its fertile plains to a wilderness.  The unhappy creature who wore the crown of Charlemagne and of Hugh Capet, was but the tool in the hands of the most profligate and designing of his own subjects, and of foreigners.  Slowly and surely the net, spread by the hands of his own mother, of his own prime minister, of the Duke of Guise, all obeying the command and receiving the stipend of Philip, seemed closing over him.  He was without friends, without power to know his friends, if he had them.  In his hatred to the Reformation, he had allowed himself to be made the enemy of the only man who could be his friend, or the friend of France.  Allied with his mortal foe, whose armies were strengthened by contingents from Parma’s forces, and paid for by Spanish gold, he was forced to a mock triumph over the foreign mercenaries who came to save his crown, and to submit to the defeat of the flower of his chivalry, by the only man who could rescue France from ruin, and whom France could look up to with respect.