The first edition of this book is dated 1928. The edition used is dated 1928. The publisher was Chatto and Windus. The number of pages is 280.

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General information

This is a book of deep scholarship, but it is also very readable. The Earl of Essex was a great Noble of the land, but owed all his progress to the interest in him taken by Elizabeth, the virgin Queen of England. His money came from the emoluments attaching to the posts to which the Queen promoted him. He needed to keep the Queen on his side, yet towards the end of their lives, when the Queen’s body was no longer attractive to him, there were occasional lapses, for instance when in a temper he referred to her body as her carcase. In the end, over quite a short period of time, after the failure of an expedition into Ireland led by Essex, the Queen and Essex fell out, and Essex paid the extreme penalty for his part in a rather silly pretence at an uprising: he was beheaded in the Tower of London. Not long after that the Queen went into a dotage and died. In those days people died much younger than they do nowadays, with all our artificial ways of prolonging our lives.

This book is not a novel, though it tells the story in a manner closely allied to that of a novel. This makes it all the more readable, but it would, we think, benefit by being read several times at the first acquaintance.

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Contents

Chapter I.
The English Reformation was not merely a religious event; it was also a social one.

Chapter II.
The reign of Elizabeth, (1558 to 1603), falls into two parts: the thirty years that preceded the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the fifteen that followed it.

Chapter III.
The summer idyll passed smoothly on, until, in the hot days of July, there was a thunderstorm.

Chapter IV.
The Armada was defeated; Leicester was dead. A new world was opening for the young and the adventurous.

Chapter V.
The spring of youth was almost over; in those days, at the age of twenty-five, most men had reached a full maturity.

Chapter VI.
Mr. Booth’s case was a brutal farce, and the splendid Earl, busied with very different preoccupations—his position with the Queen, the Attorney-Generalship, the foreign policy of England—could hardly have given a moment’s thought to it.

Chapter VII.
The Spanish question grew ever more acute. A war that was no war might exactly suit the temper of Elizabeth; but it seemed an infamy to Essex, and was no less distasteful to Henry of France, pressed hard by the Spaniards on his northern frontier and by the Catholic Leaguers in his own dominions.

Chapter VIII.
On the same day on which Essex sailed from Cadiz something of the highest moment was done in England: Elizabeth made Robert Cecil her Secretary, in name as well as in fact.

Chapter IX.
King Philip sat working in the Escurial—the gigantic palace that he had built for himself, all of stone, far away, high up, amid the desolation of the rocky Guadarrama.

Chapter X.
Essex, too, had come back, and had to face a mistress who was by no means dying.

Chapter XI.
Essex had gone away to Wanstead, where he remained in a disturbed, uncertain, and unhappy condition.

Chapter XII.
The state of affairs in Ireland was not quite so bad as it might have been.

Chapter XIII.
He was surprised, she was delighted—those were her immediate reactions; but then, swiftly, a third feeling came upon her—she was afraid.

Chapter XIV.
For Essex had now indeed abandoned himself to desperate courses.

Chapter XV.
The Government had never been in any danger, though there must have been some anxious moments at Whitehall.

Chapter XVI.
Southampton was spared. His youth and romantic devotion to Essex were accepted as a palliation of his delinquency, and the death sentence was commuted for imprisonment in the Tower.

Chapter XVII.
The end approached very gradually—with the delay which, so it seemed, had become de rigueur in that ambiguous Court.

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