it should be a great sin that should be the cause of my end, it called my conscience in doubt of my very best actions and intentions in question, for I knew that myself might easily be deceived in such a business; therefore, I protest unto you, that the doubts I had of my own good state-which only proceeded from the censure of others caused more bitterness of grief in me than all the miseries that ever I suffered, and only this caused me to wish life till I might meet with a ghostly friend For some good space I could do nothing, but, with tears, ask pardon at God's hands, for all my errors, both in actions and intentions, in this business, and in my whole life, which the censure of this, contrary to my expectance, caused me to doubt." In a subsequent letter, he states more explicitly his grounds of belief, received from Garnet, that the pope approved of the enterprize generally, though without knowing the particulars.

Nor was he singular in these sentiments. Most of the other conspirators gloried in the transaction in which they had been engaged, and spent their last breath in expressing their regret that their design should have been frustrated in the manner it was. On this point, Hume's observations are worthy of notice :- "Neither," says he, "had the desperate fortune of the conspirators urged them to this enterprize, nor had the former profligacy of their lives prepared them for so great a crime. Before that audacious attempt, their conduct seems, in general, liable to no reproach. Catesby's character had entitled him to such regard that Rookwood and Digby were seduced by their implicit trust in his judgment; and they declared that from the motive alone of friendship to him, they were ready, on any occasion, to have sacrificed their lives. Digby himself was as highly esteemed and beloved as any man in England; and he had been particularly honoured with the good opinion of Queen Elizabeth. It was bigotted zeal alone, the most absurd of prejudices, masked with reason,-the most criminal of passions, covered with the appearance of duty,-which seduced them into measures which were fatal to themselves, and had so nearly proved fatal to their country."

Sir Everard was much affected when sentence of death was passed Making a low bow to those on the bench, he said :- "If I upon him. could hear any of your lordships say you forgave me, I should go the more cheerfully to the gallows." To this all the lords present replied: "God forgive you! and we do." He was executed with the other conspirators on the 30th of January, 1606. He met his fate with calmness, and expressed his penitence on the scaffold for his offence.

Cecil, Earl of Salisbury.

BORN CIR. A. D. 1550.-DIED A. D. 1612.

ROBERT Cecil, the son of Elizabeth's favourite minister, was born about the year 1550. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge. In the parliament of 1585 and 1586, he represented the city of Westminster; for several subsequent years he was returned for the county of Hertford. In 1591, he received the honour of knighthood from Elizabeth, and in 1596, was appointed secretary of state, to the great

mortification of the earl of Essex, who wished Sir Thomas Bodley promoted to that important office. Sir Robert appears to have successfully imitated the policy of his father; while Elizabeth lived he maintained himself in her good opinion, and was entrusted with the principal management of affairs; and on her death he contrived to establish himself in the same relation to her successor, with whom he had even ventured to carry on a secret correspondence during the latter years of Elizabeth's life.

He was the first of the late queen's ministers who proclaimed King James, and the first also who tendered his service to the new monarch, despite of Northumberland's opinion that habitual caution, and a kind of official decorum, would restrain him from declaring himself promptly and without reserve. He met the king at York, and was immediately confirmed by him in all the offices which he had held under Elizabeth, to the surprise of many who had anticipated a very different reception from James for the well-known rival and enemy of the unfortunate Essex. It is said that Cecil was not a little indebted on this occasion to the good offices of Sir Roger Aston, the king's barber, and Sir George Hume. Perhaps he was; at any rate he was much too good a courtier not to be above availing himself of any influence which could be brought to bear upon his master. But he hardly needed the help of others to ingratiate himself with James. He had already studied the character of the man with whom he was now to deal, and he took care that the features which he knew James would need and look for in his prime minister should be observable in himself. In a word, he suited himself so exactly to the temper of his new sovereign, that he almost instantly became indispensable to him, and was valued accordingly. James spent four days at Cecil's princely seat of Theobald before entering his capital, and was entertained with a magnificence which he had probably never witnessed before. "To speak of Lord Robert's cost to entertain him," says a contemporary writer, "were but to imitate geographers that set a little round O for a mighty province; words being hardly able to express what was done there indeed." In James's first creation of peers, on the 20th of May 1603, Cecil was made a baron. In August 1604, he was created Viscount Cranborne; and, in less than a year thereafter, earl of Salisbury.

It would appear, however, notwithstanding his own good fortune, that Cecil was not blind to the prejudices of his master, and shared in common with the English courtiers, those feelings of deep mortification and disgust with which they beheld James's puerilities and partialities In a letter which he addressed to Sir John Harrington in 1603, he uses the following expressions :-"You know all my former steps: good knight, rest content, and give heed to one that hath sorrowed in the bright lustre of a court, and gone heavily even to the best seeming fair ground. 'Tis a great task to prove one's honesty and yet not spoil one's fortune. You have tasted as little hereof in our blessed queen's time, who was more than a man, and, in troth, sometimes less than a woman. I wish I waited now in her presence-chamber, with ease at my food and rest in my bed. I am pushed from the share of comfort, and know not where the winds and waves of a court will bear me; I know it bringeth little comfort on earth; and he is, I reckon, no wise man that looketh this way to heaven. We have much stir about councils, and more

about honours. Many knights were made at Theobald's during the king's stay at mine house, and more to be made in the city. My father had much wisdom in directing the state; and I wish I could bear my part so discreetly as he did. Farewell, good knight, but never come near London till I call you. Too much crowding doth not well for a cripple, and the king doth scant find room to sit himself, he hath so many friends as they choose to be called; and heaven prove they lie not in the end! In trouble, hurrying, feigning, suing, and such like mockers, I now rest your true friend.” 1

Cecil was not always the cool and cautious statesman. In the following letter written by Donne, we have an interesting account of a violent altercation which took place betwixt him and the earl of Hertford, whose marriage with Lady Catherine Grey had transferred to their son, Lord Beauchamp, the claims of the Suffolk line to the crown of England. "I cannot yet serve you," says Donne, "with these books of which your letter spake. In recompence I will tell you a story which, if I had had leisure to have told it you when it was fresh-which was upon Thursday last-might have had some grace for the rareness, and would have tried your love to me, how far you would adventure to believe an improbable thing for my sake who relates it. That day in the morning, there was some end made by the earl of Salisbury and others, who were arbitrators in some differences between Hertford and Monteagle; Hertford was ill-satisfied in it, and declared himself so far as to say, he expected better usage, in respect not only of his cause but of his expense and service in his embassage; to which Salisbury replied, that considering how things stood between his majesty and Hertford-house at the king's entrance, the king had done him special favour in that employment of honour and confidence, by declaring in so public and great an act and testimony that he had no ill-affection towards him. Hertford answered, that he was then and ever an honest man to the king; and Salisbury said he denied not that, but yet solemnly repeated his first words again, so that Hertford seemed not to make answer, but, pursuing his own word, said, that whosoever denied him to have been an honest man to the king lied. Salisbury asked him if he directed that upon him; Hertford said, upon any who denied this. The earnestness of both was such, as Salisbury accepted it to himself, and made protestations before the lords present, that he would do nothing else before he had honourably put off that lie. Within an hour after Salisbury sent him a direct challenge by his servant Mr Knightly. Hertford required only an hour's leisure of consideration, (it is said it was only to inform himself of the especial danger of dealing with a counsellor,) but he returned his acceptation; and all circumstances were so clearly handled between them, that St James's was agreed for the place, and they were both come from their several lodgings, and upon the way to have met, when they were interrupted by such as from the king were sent to have care of it."

The earl's opposition to the court of Spain can hardly be called an interested measure, as it tended to bring him into collision with the king himself, whose predilections towards that quarter were very strong, and of course furnished a handle to sycophants to poison the royal ear

Harrington's Nugæ, I. p. 314.

as respected Salisbury. Yet he managed his opposition so adroitly that all the efforts of the Spanish court were unable to dislodge him from his place and influence in the nation's counsels. The discovery of the gunpowder-plot gave him an immense advantage over the party in the interest of Spain, which he did not fail to employ as occasion served in exciting the fears and scruples of his master. Sir Henry Nevill, in a letter to Winwood written at this juncture, says, "My lord (Salisbury) hath gotten much love and honour this parliament by his constant dealing in matters of religion; some fruit of it was seen in his attendance to the installation, being such, as I dare avow, never subject had in any memory, I hope it will confirm and strengthen him in his good proceedings." The consequence of Salisbury's determined hostility to the catholics, was a conspiracy to assassinate him by a musquet-shot from the Savoy as he was going in his barge to court; but the design proved abortive, or was relinquished.

The death of Sackville, earl of Dorset, made way for Salisbury's preferment to the office of lord-treasurer, which he occupied without resigning that of secretary of state. His promotion gave great satisfaction to the protestant party. He might now be regarded as the sole minister of England; the king was in his hands; and the opposition which he had to encounter was so feeble that it could not be expected to embarrass his movements while he acted with any energy. Unfortunately he was weakest in that department which most needed his reforming hand. The nation looked to him for reform in the finances, but James was plunged in debt to such an extent that perpetual supplies from his treasurer were absolutely necessary to the continuance of their friendship. In this state of things Salisbury endeavoured to make the most of the royal manors, which had hitherto been grossly mismanaged, and were in fact only partially surveyed. Thus far he acted wisely, and for the true interests of the crown. But when by a new regulation, as it was called, of the customs, without the concurrence of parliament, he nearly doubled that important branch of the royal revenue, he committed a fatal error, which, in fact, laid the foundation for those financial proceedings which led to the overthrow of the Stuart dynasty. Much allowance must be made for the difficulties of the minister's situation; but it is impossible to shelter him from the charge of imprudence and unfaithfulness to the national trust reposed in him, when he advised his sovereign to have recourse to the measure here alluded to. His exertions, however, cnabled James to bear up under his accumulating difficulties, and probably but for having gratified his master on the all-important point of money, he would never have succeeded in wringing from him his reluctant consent to a treaty with Holland in 1609. Still it was with difficulty that the lord treasurer met parliament in 1610. He did his best on this occasion to apologise for the extravagance of his master; and concluded by entreating the house not to deny its supplies to "the wisest of kings, the very image of an angel, that brought good tidings, and settled us in the fruition of all good things." The appeal was partially successful; but not before 'the good angel' himself had seconded the efforts of his minister in a very absurd speech. It was well, probably, for Salisbury's historical character that he did not attain the advanced age of his father. He died of a long and painful decay, at Marlborough, on the 24th of May,

1612, in the 51st year of his age. The general sentiment of the nation towards his memory was unfavourable. His hostility to Essex,—his ar bitrary augmentation of the customs,—his revival of old feudal exactions, his indulgence of James in his absurd notions of kingly prerogative, and, above all, his assertion that the torture might lawfully be inflicted on free-born Englishmen, at their sovereign's pleasure,—were now remembered against him, and afforded too much scope for popular invective, and the libels of Weldon and Wilson. Yet the nation that deprecated his memory soon had reason to lament his loss. The lord. treasurership was intrusted to worse hands when the earl of Suffolk obtained it; and the joint-secretaryship of Sir Ralph Winwood and Sir Thomas Lake failed to support the true policy of Britain in the cabinet.

Salisbury married Elizabeth, sister to Brooke, Lord Cobham, by whom he had a son and a daughter. His descendant James, the seventh earl, was advanced to the title of marquess in 1789.

Henry, Prince of Wales.

BORN A. D. 1594.-- died a. D. 1612.

PRINCE Henry Frederick, eldest son of King James, was born at Stirling castle on the 19th of February, 1594. The care of his person and early education was intrusted to the earl of Mar, and the dowagercountess his mother. It was one of James's many foibles that he and his queen lived habitually much apart. There was little in the temper and habits of either to promote their domestic happiness; and their children were allowed to grow up under the entire charge of others, and totally removed from the observation of their parents. They were, in fact, boarded out' in the families of different noblemen; James's only care being to provide the infant heir-apparent with an expensive establishment.

The prince's governanté is said to have been a woman of a very bad temper, and to have treated her young charge with great severity. This may have been the reason of his early removal from her tuition to that of Adam Newton, a learned Scotsman, who afterwards translated into Latin the king's discourse against Vorstius, and was rewarded for this and other services with a baronetcy and the deanery of Durham. About the same time James composed his Basilicon Doron; or, his majesty's instructions to his dearest son, Henry, the prince,'—a work in which he designed to impart such measures of political wisdom and 'king-craft' to the youth, as should qualify him for the task of governing a kingdon, should providence call him to it. The first impression of this work was confined to seven copies, and the printer was sworn to secrecy: but its pedantic author could not long rest satisfied with so hiding his light under a bushel, and ultimately favoured the world with a full edition of the Basilicon Doron.'

In the last year of Queen Elizabeth, the pope, foreseeing the probability of the young prince's mounting the throne of England, and anxious, doubtless, to have the forming of his mind and sentiments, proposed to his father to undertake the sole charge and direction of his