Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 11.djvu/468

 4 $2 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 66. gether on terms of compromise ; or else, which would have equally served her purpose, she would have broken up the Anglo-French alliance. But Mary Stuart, notwithstanding her affected plaint- iveness, was proud and fierce as when she stood with Bothwell on the hills of Musselburgh. The one absorb- ing hope of her life was to see those ^ho had humbled her rolling, all of them, in the dust at her feet. The least gleam of success she construed into a turn of the tide ; and the news of the defeat and flight of the con- federates, and the execution of Gowrie, scattered her despondency and filled her with dreams of coming triumph. Walsingham was distinctly of opinion that if she would adhere to what she had said to Wade, her offer ought to be tried. ' The impediment/ he said, ' grew principally through a jealous conceit that either of the two Princesses had of the other, which could hardly be removed.' l But alarm had so far superseded the 'jealous conceit/ that Elizabeth had yielded to necessity. When Wade returned with an account of his conversa- tion, she brought herself to write a courteous letter to the Queen of Scots, and Secretary Beale was once more sent down to Sheffield to take up again the dropped threads of the treaty of the past year. He was empow- ered to tell her that if her son, at her intercession, would recall Angus and Mar, would pardon Lindsay, and pro- claim a general amnesty, if she would herself relinquish her intrigues and forbid the Archbishop of Glasgow to 1 Walsing-ham to Sadler, October 1727, 1584: MSS. MARY QUEKN OF SCOTS.