In 1599 he was made Lieutenant-General of all England; in 1601 he was instrumental in crushing the insurrection of Essex. He attended the death-bed of his Queen, being the first cousin of Queen Anne Boleyn; Howard had also married a Carey, the grand-daughter of the Queen's aunt, Mary Boleyn, sister of Queen Anne. He was at this time in great affliction for the death of this lady, and had retired from the Court to grieve in solitude; for the Queen, like her father, hated the sight of mourning. But now she had sent for her faithful Lord Admiral, and he came and knelt by her cushions and fed her with broth with a spoon, and begged her to go to bed, yet she still refused. At last she bade all go away but Howard; then in piteous accents she murmured, "My lord, I am tied by a chain of iron about my neck;" but he knew not if she spoke this in frenzy. We will end this account of the Lord High Admiral by a gayer scene.

It was the year 1608; James I. and Queen Anne of Denmark were spending November at Winchester Palace. They played games from twilight till supper-time; they danced, and the Queen noticed that the old admiral, now over sixty-seven, seemed mighty fond of Lady Margaret Stuart, daughter of the Earl of Murray, a blooming girl of nineteen. Anne told the King, and his Majesty at once made himself very busy in merrily promoting the marriage of the old veteran with his pretty cousin. They were soon married, and, before he died, the Earl of Nottingham had the pleasure of seeing two more children, one of whom succeeded his half-brother in the earldom. His remaining years were spent at Haling House in Surrey, in honourable ease and retirement; he died in his eighty-eighth year, loved and respected by all who knew him. "He was a nobleman," says Camden, "whose courage no danger could daunt, whose fidelity no temptation could corrupt."

CHAPTER VII
SIR RICHARD GRENVILLE, THE HERO OF FLORES

Richard, the son of Sir Roger Grenville, was born about the year 1540, in the west of England, of a family descended from Rollo of Normandy. In his youth he showed the same restless, daring disposition which characterised him all through life. For he was barely twenty-six when he obtained the Queen's permission to serve in Hungary against the Turks, and it is reported that he was on board the Christian fleet in the famous battle of Lepanto, 1566, won by Don John of Austria, and the crowning mercy that saved Europe from Mohammedan rule; so that the Pope, on hearing the news of the victory, exclaimed, "There was a man sent from God, and his name was John."

On his return, being a cousin of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh, the Queen took notice of him and sent him to Ireland, to serve under Sir Henry Sidney, who was so well satisfied with his energy and courage that he recommended the Queen to appoint him Sheriff of the city of Cork.

In 1571 Richard Grenville was elected one of the members for the county of Cornwall, and was knighted on becoming High Sheriff of that county.

His acquaintance with Gilbert in Ireland had set his ambition on discovering new lands in Cathay or America; so when in 1584 Raleigh obtained a patent to discover and occupy heathen lands not actually possessed by any Christian prince, Sir Richard Grenville volunteered for the voyage, and was made commander of the squadron that was to plant a first colony in Virginia—an idea of Raleigh's.

A Hollander, John Huighen van Linschoten, gives a full account of Sir Richard's character, as far as he knew it from personal experience.

This Sir Richard Grenville, he says, was a great and a rich gentleman in England and had great yearly revenues of his own inheritance; but he was a man very unquiet in his mind and greatly affected to war; inasmuch as of his own motion he offered his services to the Queen. He had performed many valiant acts, and was greatly feared in these islands and known of every man, but of nature very severe, so that his own people hated him for his fierceness and spake very hardly of him. "He was of so hard a complexion that, as he continued among the Spanish captains while they were at dinner or supper with him, he would carouse three or four glasses of wine, and in a braverie would take the glasses between his teeth and crush them in pieces and swallow them down, so that often-times the blood ran out of his mouth without any harme at all unto him."