Earl to come before them. He, pretending to
be ill, declined; and it was then settled
among his friends, that as the next day would
be Sunday when many of the citizens usually
assembled at the Cross by Saint Paul's
Cathedral, he should make one bold effort to
induce them to rise and follow him to the
Palace.

So, on the Sunday morning, he and a small
body of adherents started out of his house—
Essex House by the Strand, with steps to the
river—having first shut up in it, as prisoners,
some members of the council who came to
examine him, and hurried into the City with
the Earl at their head, crying out, "For the
Queen! For the Queen! A plot is laid for my
life!" No one heeded them, however, and
when they came to Saint Paul's there were no
citizens there. In the meantime, the prisoners
at Essex House had been released by one of
the Earl's own friends; he had been promptly
proclaimed a traitor in the City itself; and
the streets were barricaded with carts and
guarded by soldiers. The Earl got back to
his house by water, with great difficulty, and,
after an attempt to defend it against the troops
and cannon by which it was soon surrounded,
gave himself up that night. He was brought
to trial on the nineteenth, and found guilty;
on the twenty-fifth, he was executed on
Tower Hill, where he died, at thirty-four
years old, both courageously and penitently.
His step-father suffered with him. His
enemy, Sir Walter Raleigh, stood near the
scaffold all the time—but not so near to it as
we shall see him stand, before we finish his
history.

In this case, as in those of the Duke
of Norfolk and Mary Queen of Scots,
the Queen had commanded, and countermanded,
and again commanded, the execution.
It is probable that the death of her young
and gallant favorite, in the prime of his
good qualities, was never off her mind
afterwards, but she held out, the same vain,
obstinate and capricious woman, for another
year. Then she danced before her Court on
a state occasion—and cut, I should think, a
mighty ridiculous figure, doing so in an
immense ruff, stomacher, and wig, at seventy
years old. For another year still, she held
out, but, without any more dancing, and as a
moody, sorrowful, broken creature. At last,
on the tenth of March, one thousand six
hundred and three, having been ill of a very
bad cold, and made worse by the death of the
Countess of Nottingham, who was her
intimate friend, she fell into a stupor and was
supposed to be dead. She recovered her
consciousness, however, and then nothing
would induce her to go to bed; for she said
she knew that if she did, she would never get
up again. There she lay for ten days, on
cushions on the floor, without any food, until
the Lord Admiral got her into bed at last,
partly by persuasions and partly by main
force. When they asked her who should
succeed her, she replied that her seat had
been the seat of Kings, and that she would
have for her successor "No rascal's son, but
a King's." Upon this, the lords present stared
at one another, and took the liberty of asking
whom she meant; to which she replied,
"Whom should I mean, but our cousin of
Scotland!" This was on the twenty-third
of March. They asked her once again that
day, after she was speechless, whether she
was still in the same mind? She struggled
up in bed, and joined her hands over her
head in the form of a crown, as the only
reply she could make. At three o'clock next
morning, she very quietly died, in the forty-
fifth year of her reign.

That reign had been a glorious one, and is
made for ever memorable by the distinguished
men who flourished in it. Apart from the
great voyagers, statesmen, and scholars, whom
it produced, the names of BACON, SPENSER,
and SHAKSPEARE, will always be remembered
with pride and veneration by the civilised
world, and will always impart (though with
no great reason, perhaps,) some portion of
their lustre to the name of Elizabeth. It
was a great reign for discovery, for commerce,
and for English enterprise and spirit in
general. It was a great reign for the Protestant
religion and for the Reformation which
made England free. The Queen was very
popular, and in her Progresses, or journeys
about her dominions, was everywhere received
with the liveliest joy. I think the truth is,
that she was not half so good as she has
been made out, and not half so bad as she
has been made out. She had her fine qualities,
but she was coarse, capricious, and
treacherous, and had all the faults of an
excessively vain young woman long after
she was an old one. On the whole, she had
a great deal too much of her father in her, to
please me.

Many improvements and luxuries were
introduced in the course of these five and
forty years in the general manner of living;
but cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and bear-
baiting were still the national amusements;
and a coach was so rarely seen, and was such
an ugly and cumbersome affair when it was
seen, that even the Queen herself, on many
high occasions, rode on horseback on a pillion
behind the Lord Chancellor.

                       Now ready, Price 3s. 6d.,
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         Collected and revised from "Household Words,"
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