w off
all appearance of duty and respect. Intoxicated with the public favor
which he already possessed, he practised anew every art of popularity;
and endeavored to increase the general good will by a hospitable manner
of life, little suited to his situation and circumstances. His former
employments had given him great connections, with men of the military
profession; and he now entertained, by additional caresses and
civilities, a friendship with all desperate adventurers, whose
attachment, he hoped, might, in his present views, prove serviceable to
him. He secretly courted the confidence of the Catholics; but his chief
trust lay in the Puritans, whom he openly caressed, and whose manners
he seemed to have entirely adopted. He engaged the most celebrated
preachers of that sect to resort to Essex House; he had daily prayers
and sermons in his family; and he invited all the zealots in London to
attend those pious exercises. Such was the disposition now beginning
to prevail among the English, that, instead of feasting and public
spectacles, the methods anciently practised to gain the populace,
nothing so effectually ingratiated an ambitious leader with the public
as these fanatical entertainments. And as the Puritanical preachers
frequently inculcated in their sermons the doctrine of resistance to
the civil magistrate, they prepared the minds of their hearers for those
seditious projects which Essex was secretly meditating.[**]

* Cabala, p. 79.

** Birch's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 463. Camden, p. 630.

But the greatest imprudence of this nobleman proceeded from the
openness of his temper, by which he was ill qualified to succeed in
such difficult, and dangerous enterprises. He indulged himself in great
liberties of speech, and was even heard to say of the queen, that she
was now grown an old woman and was become as crooked in her mind as
in her body.[*] Some court ladies, whose favors Essex had formerly
neglected, carried her these stories, and incensed her to a high degree
against him. Elizabeth was ever remarkably jealous on this head; and
though she was now approaching to her seventieth year, she allowed her
courtiers,[**] and even foreign ambassadors,[***] to compliment her upon
her beauty; nor had all her good sense been able to cure her of this
preposterous vanity.[****] [37]

* Camden, p. 629. Osborne, p. 397. Sir Walter Raleigh's
Prerogative of Parliament, p. 43.

** Birch's Memoirs, vo