the " old fox," who hated him, with great
expectations to Ireland, to quell the rebellion of
the O'Neil in Ulster. To the queen's alarm
and infinite vexation, Essex wasted his time
in Munster, and ended by concluding a treaty
with Tyrone, tolerating the Catholic religion.
On Michaelmas eve, about ten o'clock of the
morning, Essex, booted and spurred and
splashed with mud, even to his face, threw
himself off his horse at the court gate of Nonesuch,
made haste up to the privy chamber, and
thence to the queen's bedchamber.

The queen was newly up but not dressed,
and her hair all about her face. The earl
knelt unto her, kissed her hands and had
private speech, which, says a court letter-writer
of that day, " seemed to give him great
contentment, for coming from her Majesty, to go
shift himself in his chamber, he was very pleasant,
and thanked God though he had suffered
much trouble and storms abroad, he found
a sweet calm at home. The courtiers were
aghast at the temerity of this coup de main,
but all at first seemed halcyon weather with
the returned favourite. About eleven the earl,
resplendent in satin and jewels, went up again to
the queen, and had a gracious interview of an
hour and a half. Then slight symptoms of a
squall appeared, and after dinner her Majesty
seemed much changed for so smail a time, and
began to question sharply about his precipitate
return, and to complain of his leaving suddenly,
and all things at hazard. She appointed that
very afternoon a council where the lords, might
hear him. That same night between ten and
eleven a commandment came from the queen
to my Lord of Essex, that he should keep his
chamber, and on the following Monday he was
committed to the custody of the keeper at
York House. When Sir John Harrington,
her godson, went to the queen, she chafed,
walked to and fro, and cried, snatching at his
girdle,

"By G——-, sir, I am no queen! That man is
above me. Who gave him command to come
here so soon? I did send him on other business.
Go home!"

"And home I went," says Harrington. " I
did not stay to be bidden twice. If all the
Irish rebels had been at my heels, I should
not have made better speed."

Essex was equally tossed by passion. Raleigh
says of him, "he uttered strange words, bordering
on such strange designs, that made me
hasten forth and leave his presence. Thank
heaven! I am so far home, and if I go in
such trouble again I deserve the gallows for a
meddling fool. The queen never knoweth how
to humble the haughty spirit, the haughty
spirit knoweth not how to yield, and the man's
soul seemed tossed to and fro like the waves of
a troubled sea."

His last letter repulsed, the carl grew
desperate, and resolved to seize the queen and
win over her councillors. To his house near
Temple Bar he invited the leading Puritans,
Scotch emissaries, and all disaffected noblemen
and captains. In February, 1601, took place
his foolish outbreak, and before the same month
was over the head of Essex fell from his
shoulders in the courtyard of the Tower. What
really cost him his head, said Raleigh, was not
the departure from Ireland, or the ill-hatched
rebellion, but his saying that Elizabeth "was an
old woman, as crooked in mind as in body."
Perhaps, however, she had never forgotten being
seen without her wig—who knows? Nonesuch
was given by the parliament to Algernon Sidney
and General Lambert; afterwards, during the
Plague, the office of the Exchequer was
transferred there; and after that Charles the
Second gave the palace to the Duchess of
Cleveland, who, on the same principle which
makes thieves instantly melt stolen plate,
pulled it down, sold the materials, and divided
the park into farms. There are but few traces
of the palace now, only one long deep ditch,
always wet in winter, which is called " Diana's
Ditch" by the poor people, and is supposed
to be the site of a great Diana and Actæon
fountain. A sorry ending. In the centre of a
ploughed field, in a rejoicing old age, there
stands a wonderful elm, twenty-two feet six
inches in girth and eighty feet high. It is still
full of vigour, and one of the earliest trees in
the neighbourhood to bud and bloom. The
legend is that it springs from the site of the
palace kitchen, but it is really one of those
"Queen Elizabeth elms" under which, when
hunting, she used to stand with her small
steel crossbow to kill the deer when driven
past her.

Cheam, during the great Plague, was selected
as the site of a school for citizens' children,
which still flourishes, and an old wooden
house called " Whitehall" yet exists, where
business of the palace used to be transacted.
The tower of the old church, a square ugly
stump, has a large clamp bracing it together,
to restrain a crack which gaped open as long
ago as when Archbishop Laud was in prison.
Laud had been curate here, and being a
superstitious man, who even shuddered at curious
spots coming on his nails, he trembled at
this omen, lost heart, and soon after lost his
head.

And now the crow bears away with a slant
flight to Banstead Downs, that rolling prairie
all in a golden blaze with gorse blossom, and
spotted purple with the dry, fragrant network
of wild thyme, and here, where the throbbing
windmill tosses its broad giant arms, the larks
are up by dozens above the clover and the
green corn that now, with a grey bloom on
every blade, undulates in rippling waves. Miles
of blue distance, and the crow sees St. Paul's,
no bigger than a chimney ornament in the far
distance; Windsor Castle, visible to a keen
eye, appears no bigger than a toy castle; and
on Penge Hill a little diamond speck, which is
the Crystal Palace, is pointed out by the golden
finger of an admiring sunbeam. By day the
smoke-cloud of the monster city broods on the
eastern horizon like a phantom ship, and at
night the glare of its million lamps illuminates
the sky.