It is most.
certain, if you will have your Majesty safe, it must be done, for justice doth crave it beside policy." His own personal safety was deeply compromised.

"Your Lordship and I," wrote Burghley, "were very great motes in the traitors' eyes; for your Lordship there and I here should first, about one time, have been killed.

Of your Lordship they thought rather of poisoning than slaying.

After us two gone, they purposed her Majesty's death." But on this great affair of state the Earl was not swayed by such personal considerations.

He honestly thought--as did all the statesmen who governed England--that English liberty, the very existence of the English commonwealth, was impossible so long as Mary Stuart lived.