“The lady Elizabeth arrived here yesterday, clad completely in white, surrounded by a great assemblage of servants of the Queen, besides her own people.  Her countenance was pale, her look proud, lofty, and superbly disdainful, an expression which she assumed to disguise the mortification she felt.  The Queen declined seeing her, and caused her to be accommodated in a quarter of her palace from which neither she nor her servants could go out without passing through the guards.  Of her suite, only two gentlemen, six ladies, and four servants are permitted to wait on her, the rest of her train being lodged in the city of London.  The queen is advised to send her to the Tower, since she is accused by Wyatt, named in the letters of the French ambassador, suspected by her own councillors, and it is certain that the enterprise was undertaken in her favour."*

* Record Office Transcripts (Belgian Archives), printed by Tytler in his England under the reins of Edward vi. and Mary.

When charged with complicity in the plot, Elizabeth replied that she knew nothing of it.  The members of the Council were divided concerning her, some maintaining that the legal proof against her was insufficient to justify her being sent to the Tower, while others were for giving her short shrift.  Mary availed herself of this loophole, and caused each lord of the Council in succession to be asked to undertake the custody of the princess in his own house.  Not one was willing to accept the perilous office, and a warrant was therefore made out for her committal.  There was a very general impression at the time, that her life would have been in danger, but for Mary’s determination that the law should not be infringed at her trial.  Nothing could be adduced that was not already known, and in spite of the emperor’s reiterated demands for her execution, Mary would not have her convicted on the only evidence obtainable.

It was for Elizabeth’s greater safety that the queen appointed Sir Henry Bedingfeld to be her custodian, and Foxe’s absurd description of Bedingfeld’s arrival with his hundred soldiers in blue-coats, and Elizabeth’s terror at the sight, is manifestly a fabrication of the martyrologist’s brain.  We have already had a glimpse of Sir Henry’s antecedent history.  He had materially contributed to Mary’s triumph over her enemies, and may be said to have been one of the train instruments in placing the Queen on the throne; he was a distinguished member of her Privy Council, therefore a public personage, and it is inconceivable that Elizabeth should have asked who he was, as being “a man unknown to her Grace,” or that her attendants and friends should have answered that “they were ignorant what manner of man he was.”  Foxe himself had betaken himself to foreign parts on Mary’s accession, and may perhaps be pardoned for not knowing, although we find it hard to forgive him for the baseless fabrication by which he sought to discredit the queen and all those who served her faithfully.