Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 10.djvu/110

 90 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 57. beneficial to the Queen than injurious to the common- wealth. A king in another king's realm was a private person, a king deposed was no king, and the dignity of the offender increased the offence. ' Justice and equity were to be preferred before private affections ; ' 'and to spare offenders in the highest degree was a wrong to the Prince and the realm/ 1 The Queen, whatever may have been her private impatience, was too prudent to reply, as she had replied before on other subjects to the representatives of the people. She admitted that the course which the Com- mittee recommended was 'the best and surest way/ She was perfectly aware that so long as the Queen of Scots lived, she would never herself be secure ; yet partly from weakness, partly from the peculiar tenderness which from first to last had characterized her dealings with her cousin, partly, it may be, from an instinctive foresight of the hard construction of posterity, she shrank from granting what she could no longer posi- tively refuse. She thanked the Houses for their care for her safety. She asked them only to ' defer their pro- ceedings ' for a time, and pass the less extreme measure meanwhile. The Law Officers of the Crown, she said, could contrive means of evading the particular difficulty which the Committee had raised. However carefully expressed, the meaning of this was but too obvious. ' The bosom serpent ' was still to 1 Journals of Parliament, 14 Elizabeth : D'EwEs.