observed that the only blot on the character of our great reformer, Ridley, is his sermon at St. Paul's in vindication of Queen Jane's title, as she was then called. It is said that Queen Mary was greatly opposed to her death; and that Judge Morgan, who had pronounced the sentence, soon after went mad, and in all his ravings still called to take away the Lady Jane from him.
   The effect of these successive calamities, upon the mind of the good and innocent Duchess, may be well imagined, but can be ill indeed described.
   "She was, indeed" (as Lysons observes, after his description of her monument in the Church of Chelsea), "a singular instance of the vicissitudes of fortune. Having been the wife of one of the greatest men of that age, she lived to see her husband lose his life upon the scaffold; to see one son share his father's fate, and another escape it only by dying in prison; and the rest of her children living but by permission. Amidst this distress, which was heightened by the confiscation of her property, she displayed great firmness of mind, though left destitute of fortune and friends, till the

arrival of some of the nobility from the Spanish Court, who interested themselves so warmly in her favour that they prevailed upon the Queen to reinstate her in some of her former possessions; and she conducted herself with such wisdom and prudence as enabled her to restore her overthrown house, even in a reign of cruelty and tyranny. Her surviving progeny were no less remarkable for their prosperity, than their brethren were for their misfortunes. Ambrose was restored to the title of Earl of Warwick, and enjoyed many other honours and preferments; Robert was created Earl of Leicester, and became one of Queen Elizabeth's prime ministers, and her daughter, Mary was the mother of Sir Philip Sydney." *
   As the Duchess died in 1555, in the second year of Mary, she had but little time to set her house in order; far less to rebuild it. The co-operation of the great Spanish nobles, whose advent preceded so naturally the marriage of the Queen, might have been
   * Lyson's Environs of London, under Chelsea, p. 64.