Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/525

] was by this time a miserable invalid. Her long confinement in wretched and unhealthy, half-ruinous castles, with her close confinement and her perpetual anxieties, had changed her from, the active and beautiful woman into the apparently aged and decrepit sufferer. This has been strikingly demonstrated by the exhibition of her various portraits made in London whilst these pages were being written.

Death of Sir Philip Sidney at the Battle of Zutphen. She was racked and tortured by rheumatism and neuralgia. For months together she was not able to rise from her bed, and had lost the use of her hands. Sadler, who had been employed in his youth to undermine her throne, and of late to act as an extra guard upon her, reports about this time that she was greatly changed; that she was not able to set her left foot to the ground, "and to her very great grief, not without tears, findeth it wasted and .shrunk of its natural measure." This was the deplorable remnant of that beauteous and buxom woman who had ridden against her enemies with pistols at her side, and had stirred the hearts of all men—except it were those of the petrified Burleigh and Walsingham—that ever saw her. Paulet had no great danger, therefore, of resistance in now conveying her away; yet, for fear of her partisans, he had led her by bye-paths and unfrequented places from osfi gentleman's house to another, till he safely deposited her in her last abode, the low and damp castle of Fotheringay. He had in his pocket an order from the queen, if there here any attempt at her rescue on the way, to shoot her on the spot; and this order was renewed on his arrival there, enjoining him, if he heard any noise or disturbance in her lodgings, to kill her at once, and she had a narrow escape by her chimney taking fire one night and occasioning a confusion, during which Paulot, if he had been as keenly thirsting for her blood as the queen and her ministers had been for years, might have murdered her, much to the satisfaction of his superiors.

So delighted was Elizabeth to have her victim cooped safely up in the dungeon of her doom, that she wrote this enthusiastic letter:—"Amias, my most faithful and careful servant! God reward thee treblefold for thy most troublesome charge so well discharged." After breaking out into raptures of gratitude and praises of his faithful services, she promises him all sorts of honours and recompense. "If I reward not such deserts, let me lack what I have most needed of you," &c.

She then goes on:—"Let your wicked murderess know-how, with hearty sorrow, her vile deseits compel these orders [namely, to assassinate her, if there be any attempt to rescue her]; and bid her from me ask God's forgiveness for her treacherous dealings towards the saviour of her life many a year, to the intolerable peril of my own; and yet, not content with so many forgivenesses, must fault again so terribly, far passing woman's thought, much less a princess; instead of excusing. Whereof not one can sorrow, it being so plainly confessed by the authors of my guiltless death. Let repentance take place, and let not the fiend possess her, so as her letter part may not he lost, for which I pray with hands uplifted to Him that may both save and kill. With my most loving advice and prayer for thy long life, your most assured and loving sovereign, as thereby by good deserts induced,."