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These were dramatic days which Bess of Shrewsbury witnessed. Letters were intercepted, coffers suddenly searched in the Scots Queen’s apartments, there were incursions of men with “pistolets,” constant dismissals of the Queen’s people, sudden dismissal, even, of the Countess’s own servants. But the gaps at the board were immediately filled by Huntingdon and his retinue, for whom the Shrewsburys were expected to provide without any increase of allowance, on the score that the present numbers of the household did not exceed those at Wingfield and elsewhere. The irony of this, added to the suggestions that the Earl had been too kind to his prisoner, and that his request to be allowed to deal as before with Mary without the assistance of any other officer, sprang from some person or persons “too much affectionated to her,” created havoc in Shrewsbury’s mind. Of course he visited his anger on his colleague Huntingdon in the form of morose hints. In that atmosphere of wholesale suspicion he could not speak out except in a letter to head-quarters. He knew that Elizabeth’s sinister expressions implied suspicions of his Countess. It is difficult to understand exactly what this lady was “after,” in the vulgar phrase, at this moment. For Mary, with whom she had hitherto been on excellent terms, now distrusted her also. She expressed this distrust tout au plat, as she would say, to Walsingham in October, and told him not to attach any credit “to the schemes and accusations of the Countess who is now with you.” Apparently my Lady had left for the Court, and was there making good her case and her husband’s. As likely as not she was furiously jealous of the authority wrested from her husband in favour of Huntingdon, and overwrought, like everyone else, by the acute tension of the situation. Henceforward in the correspondence with Cecil sturdy disclaimers of treason on the part of Earl and lady are always cropping up. The following is from Shrewsbury to Cecil, October, 1569:—