Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/364

344 of the Borough entertained them with warm hospitality; and the Queen, notwithstanding her efforts, found herself as it were besieged, in her principal city, by a handful of commoners, whom no one ventured, or no one could be trusted, to attack. So matters continued through Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. The lawyers at Westminster Hall pleaded in harness, and the judges wore harness under their robes; Doctor Weston sang mass in harness before the Queen; tradesmen attended in harness behind their counters. The metropolis, on both sides of the water, was in an attitude of armed expectation, yet there was no movement, no demonstration on either side of popular feeling. The ominous strangeness of the situation appalled even Mary herself.

By this time the intercepted letter of Noailles had been decyphered. It proved, if more proof was wanted, the correspondence between the ambassador and the conspirators; it explained the object of the rising—the Queen was to be dethroned in favour of her sister; and it was found, also, though names were not mentioned, that the plot had spread far upwards among the noblemen by whom Mary was surrounded. Evidence of Elizabeth's complicity it did not contain; while, to Gardiner's mortification, it showed that Courtenay, in his confessions to himself, had betrayed the guilt of others, but had concealed part of his own. In an anxiety to shield him the chancellor pronounced the cypher of Courtenay's name to be unintelligible. The