wn, it was declared that he must die
under his former sentence, now fifteen years old. So, on the
twenty-eighth of October, one thousand six hundred and eighteen, he was
shut up in the Gate House at Westminster to pass his late night on earth,
and there he took leave of his good and faithful lady who was worthy to
have lived in better days. At eight o'clock next morning, after a
cheerful breakfast, and a pipe, and a cup of good wine, he was taken to
Old Palace Yard in Westminster, where the scaffold was set up, and where
so many people of high degree were assembled to see him die, that it was
a matter of some difficulty to get him through the crowd. He behaved
most nobly, but if anything lay heavy on his mind, it was that Earl of
Essex, whose head he had seen roll off; and he solemnly said that he had
had no hand in bringing him to the block, and that he had shed tears for
him when he died. As the morning was very cold, the Sheriff said, would
he come down to a fire for a little space, and warm himself? But Sir
Walter thanked him, and said no, he would rather it were done at once,
for he was ill of fever and ague, and in another quarter of an hour his
shaking fit would come upon him if he were still alive, and his enemies
might then suppose that he trembled for fear. With that, he kneeled and
made a very beautiful and Christian prayer. Before he laid his head upon
the block he felt the edge of the axe, and said, with a smile upon his
face, that it was a sharp medicine, but would cure the worst disease.
When he was bent down ready for death, he said to the executioner,
finding that he hesitated, 'What dost thou fear? Strike, man!' So, the
axe came down and struck his head off, in the sixty-sixth year of his
age.

The new favourite got on fast. He was made a viscount, he was made Duke
of Buckingham, he was made a marquis, he was made Master of the Horse, he
was made Lord High Admiral--and the Chief Commander of the gallant
English forces that had dispersed the Spanish Armada, was displaced to
make room for him. He had the whole kingdom at his disposal, and his
mother sold all the profits and honours of the State, as if she had kept
a shop. He blazed all over with diamonds and other precious stones, from
his hatband and his earrings to his shoes. Yet he was an ignorant
presumptuous, swaggering compound of knave and fool, with nothing but his
beauty and his dancing to recommend him. This is the gentleman who
c