hlet which was printed in Flanders in 1584, and of
which a vast number of copies were imported into England, where it
obtained, from the color of the leaves and the supposed author, the
familiar title of "Father Parsons' Green-coat." In this work all the
current stories against the unpopular favorite were collected and set
forth as well attested facts; and they were related with that
circumstantiality and minuteness of detail which are too apt to pass
upon the common reader as the certain and authentic characters of truth.
The success of this book was prodigious; it was read universally and
with the utmost avidity. All who envied Leicester's power and grandeur;
all who had smarted under his insolence, or felt the gripe of his
rapacity; all who had been scandalized, or wounded in family honor, by
his unbridled licentiousness; all who still cherished in their hearts
the image of the unfortunate duke of Norfolk, whom he was believed to
have entangled in a deadly snare; all who knew him for the foe and
suspected him for the murderer of the gallant and lamented earl of
Essex;--finally, all, and they were nearly the whole of the nation, who
looked upon him as a base and treacherous miscreant, shielded by the
affection of his sovereign and wrapped in an impenetrable cloud of
hypocrisy and artifice, who aimed in the dark his envenomed weapons
against the bosom of innocence;--exulted in this exposure of his secret
crimes, and eagerly received and propagated for truth even the grossest
of the exaggerations and falsehoods with which the narrative was
intermixed.

Elizabeth, incensed to the last degree at so furious an attack upon the
man in whom her confidence was irremoveably fixed, caused her council to
write letters to all persons in authority for the suppression of these
books, and punishment of such as were concerned in their dispersion;
adding at the same time the declaration, that her majesty "testified in
her conscience before God, that she knew in assured certainty the books
and libels against the earl to be most malicious, false and scandalous,
and such as none but an incarnate devil himself could dream to be true."
The letters further stated, that her majesty regarded this publication
as an attempt to discredit her own government, "as though she should
have failed in good judgement and discretion in the choice of so
principal a councillor about her, or to be without taste or care of all
justice or conscience, in sufferi