time
environed the house, and were preparing to force their way in. His plan
succeeded. He was shot, and died that night.

Essex himself was not quite so desperate as this. He soon saw, however,
that he must sooner or later yield. He could not stand a siege in his
own private dwelling against the whole force of the English realm. He
surrendered about six in the evening, and was sent to the Tower. He was
soon afterward brought to trial. The facts, with all the arrangements
and details of the conspiracy, were fully proved, and he was condemned
to die.

As the unhappy prisoner lay in his gloomy dungeon in the Tower, the
insane excitement under which he had for so many months been acting
slowly ebbed away. He awoke from it gradually, as one recovers his
senses after a dreadful dream. He saw how utterly irretrievable was the
mischief which had been done. Remorse for his guilt in having attempted
to destroy the peace of the kingdom to gratify his own personal feelings
of revenge; recollections of the favors which Elizabeth had shown him,
and of the love which she had felt for him, obviously so deep and
sincere; the consciousness that his life was fairly forfeited, and that
he must die--to lie in his cell and think of these things, overwhelmed
him with anguish and despair. The brilliant prospects which were so
recently before him were all forever gone, leaving nothing in their
place but the grim phantom of an executioner, standing with an ax by the
side of a dreadful platform, with a block upon it, half revealed and
half hidden by the black cloth which covered it like a pall.

Elizabeth, in her palace, was in a state of mind scarcely less
distressing than that of the wretched prisoner in his cell. The old
conflict was renewed--pride and resentment on the one side, and love
which would not be extinguished on the other. If Essex would sue for
pardon, she would remit his sentence and allow him to live. Why would he
not do it? If he would send her the ring which she had given him for
exactly such an emergency, he might be saved. Why did he not send it?
The courtiers and statesmen about her urged her to sign the warrant; the
peace of the country demanded the execution of the laws in a case of
such unquestionable guilt. They told her, too, that Essex wished to die,
that he knew that he was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined, and that
life, if granted to him, was a boon which would compromise her own
safety and confer no benefit