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.

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.