Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/495

A.D. 1572.] Douglas of Lochleven, to pay £2,000 for his release, and this money she deposited at Antwerp to be paid on his enlargement. Meantime, Morton made another bargain with Elizabeth for the same sum. In the early days of June, the earl was put on board a vessel to convey him, according to the assurance of his gaolers, to Flanders; but he soon found himself approaching the English coast, and on the 7th of June he was detained at Coldingham. on the Scottish side of the border, till the money was paid over at Berwick. Lord Hunsdon, the governor of Berwick, received him at Aymouth, and then sent him on to York, under the charge of John Foster, who had obtained the earl's estates in Northumberland—a nice refinement of cruelty. At York, after being subjected to a searching interrogation, to draw from him matter against others, he was beheaded without any pretence of a trial. He died, as he had lived, a staunch Romanist; and, as he felt no respect for the queen or her Government, he honestly refused to make any such sycophantic speeches on the scaffold as were expected from the most innocent victims of those times. He would neither utter any prayer for Her Majesty, nor declare that he felt his sentence just.

John Fox, the Martyrologist.

The Papists were delighted, as well they might be, at the independent bearing of their northern chief; and the Protestants, alarmed at the boldness of the victim, and the applauses of his admirers, called loudly for the blood of other traitors and idolaters.

To the Queen of Scots these were sorrowful days. In England and in Scotland her stoutest supporters were perishing, and her cause everywhere unsuccessful. She was now, after various removes, confined at Sheffield Park, a seat of the Earl of Shrewsbury's. The Countess of Shrewsbury, a masculine and domineering woman, who was familiarly known as Bess of Hardwick, treated Mary with uncommon harshness and rigour.

She was grown extremely jealous of the earl's attentions to his captive, Shrewsbury seeming to have been a gentle and humane man. Sir Ralph Sadler was now added to her gaolers, a man who had spent his life as a commissioner of murder under three monarchs on the Scottish border, and had had a negotiating hand in the bloody deaths of Cardinal Beaton and Darnley. In Sadler's letters to Burleigh he himself informs us of the manner in which he tormented the captive queen, whom he was anxious, as a tool of Burleigh's, to see put to death as soon as