near relative—for he was the great-grandson of Elizabeth’s aunt, Mary Boleyn—it has been shrewdly suggested that the letter was dictated by the queen herself. Essex, however, replied with undiminished rage, saying, "Let Solomon's fool laugh when he is stricken; let those that mean to make their profit of princes show no sense of princes' injuries: as for me, I have received wrong, and I feel it."
The rupture took place in June, and not till the 6th of November did the haughty favourite and the offended queen become reconciled; and it is not probable that the reconciliation was ever sincere on the part of Elizabeth. She had read the letters of his sister to her heir-apparent, in which he was represented as "the weary knight," waiting impatiently for her death; and his defiant air and words under such circumstances were not likely to be forgotten. Meantime, whilst this quarrel had been proceeding, death had removed two persons of great consequence in the history of Elizabeth—her aged minister Burleigh, and Philip of Spain.
Henry of Navarre (afterwards Henry IV. of France.) From an old Engraving of that period.
Burleigh died on the 4th of August, 1598, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. It has been the fashion to style him a great minister: it is a grand misnomer, he was clever, but a very different man to a great minister. A truly great minister is a man who, with great natural abilities and an accomplished education, possesses great and noble principles, and endeavours to serve his country by means that are honest and honourable. Burleigh had but one principle—that of serving himself and the queen by any means that promised to obtain the end he had in view—which end with him might be safe, but was never generous or
