privilege of having your head cut off. You must have something more, my lord; you must have fine estates, noble castles, and handsome revenues in good pounds sterling. Now King Henry the Eighth confiscated the estates of Lord Talbot, who was beheaded sixteen years ago. You have prevailed upon Queen Mary to give Lord Talbot's estates to you. But in order that the gift may be valid, Lord Talbot must have died without heirs of his body. If there exists an heir or an heiress of Lord Talbot—as Lord Talbot died for Queen Mary and her mother, Katharine of Arragon, as Lord Talbot was a Papist and the Queen is a Papist, there is no doubt that Queen Mary would take the estates from you, my lord, favourite though you be, and would restore them, as a matter of duty, of gratitude, and of religion, to such heir or heiress. You were without apprehension in that direction. Lord Talbot had had no other child than a little girl who disappeared from her cradle at the time of her fathers execution, and whom all England believed to be dead. But your spies have lately discovered that, during the night when Lord Talbot and his party were exterminated by King Henry, a child was left mysteriously with a carver on London Bridge, and that it is probable that that child, brought up under the name of Jane, was Jane Talbot, the little girl who vanished. The written evidence of her birth was lacking, it is true; but it might be found any day. It was an annoying incident. To find one's self, perchance, compelled to restore to a Shrewsbury child the beautiful city of Wexford and the magnificent county of Waterford! a cruel fate! What was to be done? You sought a means of ruining and annihilating the girl. A
