"That he would wear it for his sovereign's sake, and he doubted not, with God's favour, to restore her ships in safety, and either to bring back the Spaniards prisoners, if they came in his way, or to sink them in the deep sea."

"So, as sir John passed in his barge, the queen, looking out of a window at Greenwich palace, shaked her fan at him, and put out her hand towards him. Whereupon, he making a low obeisance, put the scarf and jewel round his neck.' Sir John encountered no enemy but a dreadful

storm.

Perrot was soon after appointed by the queen to the highest military command in Ireland, where, while he exercised the most despotic cruelty on the insurgents, he manifested the strongest inclination to act independently of her majesty, whose birth he considered not a whit better than his own. The speeches he made on various occasions to this effect, were carefully registered against him. It was his pleasure to suppress the cathedral of St. Patrick; the queen forbade this proceeding when he thus undutifully addressed the council:-" Stick not so much on the queen's letters of commandment, for she may command what she will, but we will do what we like." The queen appointed Mr. Errington clerk of the exchequer, on which sir John exclaimed, "This fiddling woman troubles me out of measure. God's dear lady, he shall not have the office! I will give it to sir Thomas Williams." This was proved by the oath of his secretary, Philip Williams, who, when he was brought to trial for disobedience and contempt of the queen, was the principal witness against him. Sir John earnestly requested his secretary might be confronted with him; but with the infamous injustice with which such trials were carried on in the sixteenth century, Popham, the queen's attorney-general, forbade this reasonable request. One of the depositions of this man touched Elizabeth on tender ground; at the time of the Spanish invasion, sir John by his report said, "Ah, silly woman, now she shall not curb me! now she shall not rule me! Now, God's dear lady, I shall be her white boy again;" adding, that when sir John Garland brought him a letter from the queen, he said, with violent execrations, "This it is, to serve a base-born woman! Had I served any prince in

Christendom, I had not been thus dealt withal." He was accused of treasonable communication with Spain, but nothing was proved excepting foolish speeches.

He attributed his disgrace chiefly to the malice of his old enemy, sir Christopher Hatton, whom he despised as a carpet knight, who had danced his way into Elizabeth's good graces. When sir John Perrot was told he must die, he exclaimed, "God's death! will my sister sacrifice her brother to his frisking adversaries ?"

When Elizabeth heard this truly Tudor-like remonstrance, she paused from signing his death-warrant, saying"They were all knaves that condemned him."

His furious antipathy to sir Christopher Hatton, and his sneers at his dancing, will remind the reader of Gray's celebrated lines

"My lord high-keeper led the brawls,

The seals and maces danced before him."

Sir John Perrot was not executed, but pined himself to death, like a prisoned eagle, in confinement in the Tower. The greatest contradiction ever offered to queen Elizabeth proceeded from men of her own blood. One afternoon, when she was at cards, she turned to her young kinsman, Robert Carey, who stood at her elbow, and asked him when his father, lord Hunsdon, meant to depart to his government at Berwick? he replied, "after Whitsuntide." This information put her majesty into a great rage, "God's wounds!" she exclaimed, "I will set him by the feet, and send another in his place if he dallies thus." Robert Carey replied, that the delay was but to make provision. She declared that Hunsdon had been going from Christmas to Easter, and from Easter to Whitsuntide; and if he was not off directly, she would put another in his place, and so she commanded Carey to tell him. But Hunsdon came of her own lineage, and shared her own indomitable spirit. By way of reply he told his mind very freely to Burleigh. The threat of laying him by the feet, he could not digest, and alluded to it in these high spirited words: "Any imprisonment she may put me to shall redound to her dishonour; because I neither have nor will I deserve it."3

State Trials, p. 30, vol. vii.

* Fragmenta Regalia.

* Life of sir Robert Carey, p. 231–233.

The queen's conduct to this faithful kinsman is characteristic of her niggardliness. He had a double claim on the earldom of Wiltshire. Elizabeth withheld it through his life, but when he was on his death-bed, she sent the robes and patent to his bed-side. Whereupon, he who could dissemble neither in life nor death, sent them back with these words, "Tell the queen, that if I was unworthy these honours living, I am unworthy of them dying."

It will be allowed, that a narrative wholly devoted to the personal biography of Elizabeth, can afford but a few words as a retrospect of her regal sway over the sister island. Ireland," says Naunton, "cost her more vexation than anything else. The expense of it pinched her; the ill success of her officers wearied her; and in that service she grew hard to please." The barbarity with which she caused that country to be devastated, is unprecedented, excepting in the extermination of the Caribs by the Spaniards.

Henry VIII. had given himself little concern with the state of religion in Ireland; it remained virtually a catholic country; the monasteries and their inhabitants were not uprooted, as in England; and the whole country incipiently acknowledged the supremacy of the pope, through all the Tudor reigns, till Elizabeth ascended the throne. The false step taken by the pope at Elizabeth's accession, by mooting the point of her reign de juro, instead of considering it de facto, forced her into the measure of insisting that all Ireland should renounce the catholic religion, and become protestant; and this she enforced under the severest penal laws. Ireland, which had acknowledged the English monarchs as suzerains, or lords paramount over their petty kings and chiefs for several centuries, had scarcely allowed them as kings of Ireland for a score years, now flamed out into rebellion, against the English lord-deputy; and this functionary, by the queen's orders, governed despotically, by mere orders of council; and endeavoured to dispense with the Irish parliament. The taxes were forthwith cessed at the will of the lord-deputy. The earl of Desmond, the head of the Fitzgeralds, and possessed at that time of an estate of six hundred thousand acres, aided by lord Baltinglas, head of the Eustaces, whose family had for four generations filled the office of lords-treasurer, or lords-deputy, and were ever closely allied with the Geraldines, resisted the

payment of this illegal tax, and required that a parliament might be called, as usual, to fix the demands on the subject; for which measure, these gallant precursors of Hampden were forthwith immured in a tower of Dublin castle. They sent messengers to Elizabeth, to complain of the conduct of her lord-deputy; for which presumption, as she called it, she transferred them to the more alarming prison of the Tower of London. The English parliament, however, finding their sole crime was the vindication of the existence of a parliament in Ireland, were inclined to view the case as bearing on their own. Elizabeth, therefore, postponed her vengeance on Desmond and Baltinglas, and ordered their liberation.

Philip of Spain then, in revenge for the assistance given by Elizabeth to his protestant subjects in the Low Countries, proffered aid to the Irish; the Geraldines and Eustaces flew to arms, and for many years sustained a contest with the English lord-deputy. At length the venerable earl of Desmond, crushed by overwhelming numbers, became a fugitive, and after wandering about in glens and forests for three years, was surprised in a lonely hut by a party of his enemies. Kelly of Moriarty struck off his head, and conveyed it, as an acceptable present, to queen Elizabeth, by whose order it was fixed on London Bridge.'

The lord-deputy Montjoy (the Irish say by the advice of Spenser, the poet), the commander of the English forces, commenced that horrid war of extermination which natives call "the hag's wars." The houses and standing corn of the wretched natives were burnt, and the cattle killed, wherever the English came, which starved the people into temporary submission. When some of the horrors of the case were represented to the queen, and she found the state to which the sister island was reduced, she was heard to exclaim, "that she found she had sent wolves, not shepherds, to govern Ireland, for they had left nothing but ashes and carcasses for her to reign over!"

This deprecatory speech did not, however, save the lives of the patriots who had resisted the extinction of the Irish parliaments. Lord Baltinglas was beheaded, and a peculiar act passed, called the Statute of Baltinglas, which confiscated the estates granted to the Eustaces in Ireland, al

› Camden. Lingard.

though the young brother of lord Baltinglas had taken no part in the rebellion.'

The latter days of Elizabeth were certainly impoverished and embittered by the long strife in Ireland, and if her sister declared "that, when dead, Calais would be found written on her heart," Elizabeth had as much reason to affirm, that the burning cares connected with the state of Ireland had wasted her lamp of life.

See the important document in Egerton Papers, published by the Camden Society, headed, " Royal Prerogative." The Rev. Charles Eustace, of Kildare, is the representative of this family, and the claimant of the Baltinglas peerage. The illegal attainder, by which the last lord Baltinglas suffered, could not, in point of law or justice, affect the descendants of his brother, who never forfeited his allegiance. The restoration, by George IV., of the forfeited peerages to the descendants of some of the noblemen who suffered for their devotion to the cause of Stuart, was not only a generous but a politic measure, as it healed all ancient wounds, and for ever quenched the spirit of hereditary disaffection to the reigning family in many a noble heart, which, from that hour, glowed with loyal affection to the sovereign, in grateful acknowledgment of the royal act of grace. Surely the services which the father and brothers of the venerable claimant of the Baltinglas peerage have performed for England, have been sufficient to obliterate the offence of their collateral ancestor, the unfortunate but patriotic victim of the unconstitutional government of Elizabeth in Ireland.

END OF VOL. VI.

T. C. Savill, Printer, 107, St. Martin's Lane.