barricaded
with carts and guarded by soldiers. The Earl got back to his house by
water, with difficulty, and after an attempt to defend his house 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 it as we shall see him stand,
before we finish his history.

In this case, as in the cases 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
favourite 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 that she knew that if she did, she should 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 m