The queen continued to pursue from habit, and probably from policy also, amusements for which all her relish was lost. She went a-maying to Air. Buckley's at Lewisham, and paid several other visits in the course of the year;—but her efforts were unavailing; the irrevocable past still hung upon her spirits. About the beginning of June, in a conversation with M. de Beaumont the French ambassador, she owned herself weary of life; then sighing, whilst her eyes filled with tears, she adverted to the death of Essex; and mentioned, that being apprehensive, from his ambition and the impetuosity of his temper, of his throwing himself into some rash design which would prove his ruin, she had repeatedly counselled him, during the two last years, to content himself with pleasing her, and forbear to treat her with the insolent contempt which he had lately assumed; above all, not to touch her sceptre; lest she should be compelled to punish him by the laws of England, and not according to her own laws; which he had found too mild and favorable to give him any cause of fear: but that her advice, however salutary and affectionate, had proved ineffectual to prevent his ruin.
A letter from sir John Harrington to his lady, dated December 27th, 1602, gives the following melancholy picture of the state of his sovereign and benefactress.
"Sweet Mall;
"I herewith send thee what I would God none did know, some ill-bodings of the realm and its welfare. Our dear queen, my royal godmother and this state's natural mother, doth now bear some show of human infirmity; too fast, for that evil which we shall get by her death, and too slow, for that good which she shall get by her releasement from pains and misery. Dear Mall, how shall I speak what I have seen or what I have felt? thy good silence in these matters emboldens my pen. For thanks to the sweet God of silence, thy lips do not wanton out of discretion's path like the many gossiping dames we could name, who lose their husbands' fast hold in good friends rather than hold fast their own tongues. Now I will trust thee with great assurance; and whilst thou dost brood over thy young ones in the chamber, thou shalt read the doings of thy grieving mate in the court. I find some less mindful of what they are soon to lose, than of what they may perchance hereafter get: Now, on my own part, I cannot blot from my memory's table the goodness of our sovereign lady to me, even, I will say, before born. Her affection to my mother, who waited in privy-chamber, her bettering the state of my father's fortune (which I have, alas, so much worsted), her watchings over my youth, her liking to my free speech and admiration of my little learning and poesy, which I did so much cultivate on her command, have rooted such love, such dutiful remembrance of her princely virtues, that to turn askant from her condition with tearless eyes, would stain and foul the spring and fount of gratitude. It was not many days since I was bidden to her presence; I blessed the happy moment, and found her in most pitiable state; she bade the archbishop ask me if I had seen Tyrone? I replied with reverence, that I had seen him with the lord deputy; she looked up with much choler and grief in her countenance, and said: O! now it mindeth me that you was one who saw this man elsewhere[142], and hereat she dropped a tear and smote her bosom; she held in her hand a golden cup, which she often put to her lips; but in truth her heart seemeth too full to need more filling. This sight moved me to think of what passed in Ireland, and I trust she did not less think on some who were busier there than myself. She gave me a message to the lord deputy, and bade me come to the chamber at seven o'clock. Hereat some who were about her did marvel, as I do not hold so high place as those she did not choose to do her commands.... Her majesty inquired of some matters which I had written; and as she was pleased to note my fanciful brain, I was not unheedful to feed her humour, and read some verses, whereat she smiled once, and was pleased to say: 'When thou dost feel creeping time at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less; I am past my relish for such matters; thou seest my bodily meat doth not suit me well; I have eaten but one ill-tasted cake since yesternight.' She rated most grievously at noon at some one who minded not to bring up certain matters of account: several men have been sent to, and when ready at hand, her highness hath dismissed in anger; but who, dearest Mall, shall say, that 'your highness hath forgotten?'"
During the campaign of 1602, lord Montjoy had been occupied in Ireland in reducing the inferior rebels to submission; in building forts and planting garrisons; at the same time wasting the country in every direction, for the purpose of straitening the quarters of Tyrone and cutting off his supplies. At length, having collected all his forces, he purposed to hazard an attack on the chieftain himself, in the midst of the desert fastnesses to which he had driven him; but the difficulties which he experienced from the impassable state of the roads, the treachery of scouts and the inclemency of the season, compelled him to defer this undertaking till the return of spring. Meantime, such was the extremity of distress to which Tyrone had been reduced, that numbers of his people had perished by hunger; and perceiving the remnant fast diminishing by daily desertion, he renewed the offer of surrender on certain conditions which he had propounded some months before. At that time, Cecil had once prevailed upon her majesty, for the sake of avoiding the intolerable expense of a further prosecution of the Irish war, to sign the rebel's pardon;—but she had immediately retracted the concession, and all that he was able finally to gain of her, by the intercession of the French ambassador, was a promise, that if Tyrone were not taken by the lord deputy before winter, she would consent to pardon him. About Christmas her council urged upon her the fulfilment of this engagement; but she replied with warmth, that she would not begin at her age to treat with her subjects, nor leave such an ill example after her decease[143].
The importunities of her ministers, however, among whom Tyrone is said to have made himself friends, finally overpowered the reluctance of the queen; and she authorized the deputy to grant the rebel his life, with some part of the terms which he asked; but so extreme was her mortification in making this concession, that many have regarded it as the origin of that deep melancholy to which she soon after fell a victim. The council apprehended, or affected to apprehend, that Tyrone would still refuse to surrender on the hard conditions imposed by the queen; but so desperate was now his situation, that without even waiting to receive them, he had thrown himself at the feet of the deputy and submitted his lands and life to the queen's mercy. Ministers more resolute, or more disinterested, might therefore have spared her the degradation, as she regarded it, of treating with a rebel. The news of his final submission, which occurred four days only before her death, she never learned.
The closing scene of the long and eventful life of queen Elizabeth is all that now remains to be described; but that marked peculiarity of character and of destiny which has attended her from the cradle, pursues her to the grave, and forbids us to hurry over as trivial and uninteresting the melancholy detail.
Notwithstanding the state of bodily and mental indisposition in which she was beheld by Harrington at the close of the year 1602, the queen had persisted in taking her usual exercises of riding and hunting, regardless of the inclemencies of the season. One day in January she visited the lord admiral, probably at Chelsea, and about the same time she removed to her palace of Richmond.
In the beginning of March her illness suddenly increased; and it was about this time that her kinsman Robert Cary arrived from Berwick to visit her. In his own memoirs he has thus related the circumstances which he witnessed on this occasion.
"When I came to court I found the queen ill-disposed, and she kept her inner lodging; yet she, hearing of my arrival, sent for me. I found her in one of her withdrawing chambers, sitting low upon her cushions. She called me to her; I kissed her hand, and told her it was my chiefest happiness to see her in safety and in health, which I wished might long continue. She took me by the hand, and wrung it hard, and said, 'No, Robin, I am not well;' and then discoursed with me of her indisposition, and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days, and in her discourse she fetched not so few as forty or fifty great sighs. I was grieved at the first to see her in this plight; for in all my lifetime I never knew her fetch a sigh, but when the queen of Scots was beheaded. Then, upon my knowledge, she shed many tears and sighs, manifesting her innocence, that she never gave consent to the death of that queen.