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 loyal enough to promote your schemes in return for treasonable concessions to their insidious and usurped authority. They do with you as they have done in all lands. They promise their aid in order to ride into power by your means, only tosecure within the kingdom a more perfidious and insinuating pretense than formerly they dared assert. But Bohemia knows her right; her heart is still sound, although her hand is feeble; and never shall the unshaken resolution of this land stoop before the foul machinations of an alien intruder and a bastard ”

“To me,” added Nicolas Jaroslav, “the facts are known; I registered and recorded them; and I avow the absolute innocence of the Lord Zawis in that much repeated matter of the fifty thousand marks. I did preserve the original grant by King Otakar to his Queen Kunigunde. It has for the present disappeared; but I warn the duke of Troppau, that the perpetrator of that treason and that robbery shall yet be revealed, to his infinite shame and confusion.”

Here Benes of Wartenberg interposed; and at his instance a secret consultation took place. Consternation seemed to possess the assembly. Tobias only preserved aserene countenance. At length Benes said: “Intelligence of a very startling character has arrived from Eger The king seeks from the emperor formal confirmation in all his lands and kingdoms. Very serious representations have been made to the emperor that some informalities are observable in the records of the late king’s marriage with Queen Kunigunde.