to his surprise she asked him if the warrant was sealed.
"Yes, your Majesty," he replied, "according to your instructions."
"Why so much haste?" asked the Queen. To which Davison replied that she had ordered him to use despatch.
"Does your Majesty," he continued, "wish the warrant executed or not?"
"Yes," she replied, "but I like not the form of it;" and suggested that poison might be better: all of which meant that she preferred to await Paulet's definite reply before engaging her own responsibility.
Davison began to grow alarmed, and he went to Burghley to say that he declined further responsibility in the matter, having carried out his orders. Burghley summoned the council for the next day; and after repeating to them Davison's story, Burghley despatched the warrant post-haste to Fotheringay, by Beale. The next morning, February 4, Davison entered the Queen's room, where she was gayly chatting with Raleigh. Turning to the Secretary, she told him she had dreamed that the Queen of Scots had been executed, and that the dream had made her so angry that it was a good thing for Davison that he had not been near her at the time. This naturally frightened the poor man, and he tremblingly asked her if she really did not want the warrant executed. She replied with an oath that she did, but repeated what she had said before about the responsibility and "another way." The train that was to destroy Davison was already prepared; and when, a day or two later, he told the Queen that Paulet declined to poison Mary without a warrant, his doom was sealed. On the evening of the 9th of February, Elizabeth learned that the head of the Queen of Scots had fallen at Fotheringay the day before. Her simulated rage knew no bounds. All her councillors, accomplices though they were, agreed to bear a share of the pretended disgrace, but upon Davison the real blow fell. The Queen stormed and swore to foreigners that the Puritan knave had disobeyed her, and that it was not her intention to have Mary put to death. One by one the councillors crept back into the Queen's favor when it was found that no foreign sovereign would avenge Mary's death; but the sun of Davison had sunk to rise no more. Ruined, disgraced, and in prison, he suffered for the rest of his life, and not even the indignant championship of Essex availed in his behalf.
"Good Queen Bess" has come down to us in history as the embodiment of a great tradition—that of the first rise of England as a world power. In a forceful and unscrupulous age, and in a country youthfully self-conscious of the growing power which enabled the English nation to strike from the nerveless hands of Spain the sceptre of the sea, this woman, by happy circumstance the Queen of the people in whom these new hopes were bred, was herself a concentration of the forces which gave to England the victory. Careless of the rights or feelings of others so long as her own end was served; supremely vain, violent, and greedy, and absolutely self-centred, yet steadfast in the pursuit of her objects, good and bad. These were the qualities which enabled Elizabeth to triumph, and the English nation to rise on the ashes of weaker or more scrupulous peoples. They were the qualities of youth, for the English nation was young; but if a monarch of another mould than Elizabeth had ruled over England at that crucial time of its history, the nation's youthful development might have been retarded or stopped. That the Queen and her people marched together, and aided each other by the exercise of similar qualities, has invested Elizabeth with the character of a really national Queen, and made her one of the most successful of sovereigns. When England began to truckle and cringe at the bidding of base King James, no wonder that her people, looking back to the time when, thanks to Elizabeth's character, Englishmen were allowed and encouraged to trample underfoot all interests but their own, they should build around her fame the tradition of "Good Queen Bess." Good she was to them, because like unto themselves in the age in which they lived; "good" to England for all time because of the brilliant national results of her personal rule; whether "good" to the world, or in the abstract, let those decide who hold that truth and uprightness shall always in the end prevail, and that no permanent good ever came of evil doing.
