presence; and upon my Lord of Essex's fall, so confident she was in her own princely judgment and opinion she had conceived of his worth and conduct, that she would have this noble gentleman, and none other, to finish and bring the Irish war to a propitious end: for it was a prophetical speech of her own, that it would be his fortune and his honour to cut the thread of that fatal rebellion, and to bring her in peace to the grave; where she was not deceived, for he atchieved it, but with much pains and carefulness, and not without the fears and many jealousies of the court and times, wherewith the Queen's age, and the malignity of her setting times were replete. And so I come to his dear friend in court, Mr Secretary Cecill, whom in his long absence from court he adored as his saint, and courted for his only Mecenas, both before and after his departure from court, and during all the times of his command in Ireland; well knowing that it lay in his

power, and by a word of his mouth, to make or mar him.*

* Lord Mountjoy was sent to Ireland as lord-deputy in 1599, upon the departure of Essex. He had the honour to terminate the long war with Tyrone, which had broke the heart of Norris, and was the remote cause of the fall and death of Essex. Morrison has preserved in his Journal an account of that war, and some part of the correspondence between the lord-deputy and Cecill.

Lord Mountjoy returned to England in 1605, bringing with him the vanquished Tyrone in a sort of triumph. He received many favours from James, who had succeeded Elizabeth during his absence, and was finally created Earl of Devonshire. But he did not long enjoy his new honours, as he died of an ardent fever, April 1606.

CECILL.

Sir Robert Cecill, since Earl of Salisbury, was the son of the Lord Burleigh, and the inheritor of his wisdom, and by degrees successor of his places and favours, though not of his lands, for he had Sir Thomas Cecill his elder brother, since created Earl of Exeter : he was first secretary of state, then master of the wards, and in the last of her reign came to be lordtreasurer; all which were the steps of his father's greatness, and of the honour he left to his house. For his person he was not much beholding to nature, though somewhat for his face, which was the best part of his outside; but for his inside, it may be said, and without solecism, that he was his father's own son, and a pregnant proficient in all discipline of state. He was a courtier from his cradle, which might have

made him betimes, yet at the

age of twen

ty and upwards, he was much short of his after proof, but exposed, and by change of climate, he soon made show what he was, and would be. He lived in those times wherein the Queen had most need and use of men of weight, and amongst able ones, this was a chief, as having his sufficiency from his instructions that begat him, the tutorship of the times and court, which were then the academies of art and cunning; for such was the Queen's condition from the tenth or twelfth of her reign, that she had the happiness to stand up, whereof there is a former intimation, though environed with more enemies, and assaulted with more dangerous practices, than any Prince of her times, and of many ages before; neither must we in this her preservation attribute too much to human policies; for that God, in his omnipotent providence, had not only ordained those secondary means as instruments of the work,

T

but by an evident manifestation, that the same work which she acted, was a well pleasing service of his own, out of a pecu liar care, had decreed the protection of the work-mistress, and thereunto added his abundant blessing upon all, and whatsoever she undertook; which is an observation of satisfaction to myself that she was in the right, though to others now breathing under the same form and frame of her government, it may not seem an animadversion of any worth; but I leave them to the peril of their own folly. And so again to this great master of state, and the staff of the Queen's declining age, who, though his little crooked person could not promise any great supportation, yet it carried thereon a head and a head-piece of a vast con-tent; and therein it seems nature was so diligent to complete one, and the best part about him, as that to the perfection of his memory and intellectuals, she took care also of his senses, and to put him in linceos oculos, or to pleasure him the more, bor