Melville's charge; how the body and the
head had been taken upstairs, had been roughly embalmed, and laid in a
locked chamber; how her servants had been found peeping through the
keyhole and praying aloud there, till Sir Amyas had had the hole stopped
up. He had told them, too, of the events that followed; of the mass M.
de Preau had been permitted to say in the Queen's oratory on the morning
after; and of the oath that he had been forced to take that he would not
say it again; of the destruction of the oratory and the confiscation of
the altar furniture and vestments.
All this he had told, little by little; and of the Queen's noble bearing
upon the scaffold, her utter fearlessness, her protestations that she
died for her religion and for that only, and of the pesterings of Dr.
Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough, who had at last given over in despair,
and prayed instead. The rest they knew for themselves--of the miserable
falseness of Elizabeth, who feigned, after having signed the warrant and
sent it, that it was Mr. Davison's fault for doing as she told him; and
of her accusations (accusations that deceived no man) against those who
had served her; of the fires made in the streets of all great towns as a
mark of official rejoicing over Mary's death; and of the pitiful
restitution made by the great funeral in Peterborough, six months after,
and the royal escutcheons and the tapers and the hearse, and all the
rest of the lying pretences by which the murderess sought to absolve her
victim from the crime of being murdered.
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