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Still, upon the whole, she could not question for long the honesty of Somerset's denial and if that message had indeed been sent by him, it must have been done while he was in another such an unhappy state as that exemplified by the portrait. The supposition reconciled all differences; and yet she could not but fight against it with all the strength of a generous affection.
But after having set in every possible light the terms with which his friend had spoken of her, he at length convinced her of what her heart so earnestly wished to believe that the love of Sobieski was indeed hers. Mr. Somerset's next achievement was to overcome her scruples against sanctioning him with the commission he was bent on communicating to Thaddeus.
"What, good Master Avery," exclaimed Elizabeth, as she ran her eye over the scroll, "you to be Lord of Misrule and Master of the Revels! And by my Lord of Somerset's own appointing? I am right glad to learn it."
He was hardly gone when James added, "I shall never see him more." His ruin in fact was already settled. In a few days he was a prisoner with his wife in the Tower; the agents in the fatal plot were sent to trial and to the gallows; and in May 1616 the young Countess was herself brought before the Lord Steward's Court to avow her guilt. Somerset's daring nature made a more stubborn stand.
Queen, Primate, Councillors seized on the handsome youth to pit him against the favourite; in spite of Somerset's struggles he rose from post to post; and the Earl's ruin sealed his greatness. He became Master of the Horse; before the close of 1616 he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Villiers, and gifted with lands to the value of eighty thousand pounds.
French intrigue and money, aided by the queen-regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise, succeeded, after Henry's death and Somerset's invasion of Scotland, in gaining firm hold upon Scotland, and Mary, as the betrothed wife of the dauphin Francis, was carried to France in 1548, at the age of six, to be reared by her cunning kinsmen of Lorraine, and made, as it was hoped, a future powerful instrument to aid Catholic French objects against England, and the reformation in France and elsewhere.
'Man or woman? he asked. The landlady, who always liked to reply in person to Somerset's inquiries, apparently thinking him, by virtue of his drawing implements and liberality of payment, a possible lord of Burleigh, came forward and said it was certainly not a woman, but whether man or boy she could not say. 'His name is Mr. Dare, she added. 'O that youth, he said.
One day, in pursuit of the enemy, Thaddeus was so unlucky as to lose the pocket-book which contained his friend's address; but yet, uneasy at his silence, he ventured two letters to him, directed merely at Sir Robert Somerset's, England.
Second, on his, Somerset's, paying her a flying visit some time during the spring. Since she had requested it, he made no haste in his reply. When penned, it ran in the words subjoined, which, in common with every line of their correspondence, acquired from the strangeness of subsequent circumstances an interest and a force that perhaps they did not intrinsically possess.
From this moment it was a mere series of French successes. In two months half Normandy was in the hands of Dunois; Rouen rose against her feeble garrison and threw open her gates to Charles; and the defeat at Fourmigny of an English force which was sent to Somerset's aid was a signal for revolt throughout the rest of the provinces.
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