"I should do God and mine own conscience wrong if I do not justify myself as an honest man. This hand shall pull out this heart when any disloyal thought shall enter it."
The following August his tyrant again summoned him to York House, where he was told that her Majesty was pleased to give him his liberty, but he must not enter her presence nor come to court. Though free, he was constantly spied upon. Through the remainder of the summer his friends appealed to the Queen to restore him to favor. Essex wrote her imploring letters, that brought no answer. He brooded over his fall and loss of power, until he grew desperate, and gathered about him at Essex House all the disaffected people of London, among them a host of Puritans. They formed many wild schemes—at one time a plan to capture the Tower and palace; at another, to march to the court and compel Essex's enemies to give him a hearing. The Queen remained cold and silent. He talked of her and of his own wrongs, and said "she was an old woman crooked both in body and in mind." Sir Walter Raleigh insisted that this speech sealed his doom; for spies reported everything he said and did.
His last piece of folly was to raise a riot one morning in the streets of London with three hundred followers, declaring that "the kingdom was sold to Spain by Cecil and Raleigh." The mob was quickly dispersed, and Essex slipped back to his house alone in a small boat. He had shut up as prisoners there some officers of the court who had been sent to talk with him and bring him to reason. He had hoped to secure his own safety by giving these as hostages, but Sir Ferdinando Georges, one of his own men, had liberated them, and as he had already been proclaimed traitor, there was nothing to be done but to barricade the house. It was surrounded by the Queen's troops, and he held out till 10 o'clock at night, and only surrendered then because "he was sore vexed with the tears and incessant screams of the ladies." He was confined that night in Lambeth Palace, and on Monday, February 9, 1601, together with his followers, was taken to the Tower. When the boat glided through the Traitors' Gate beneath St. Thomas's Tower, he must have realized the hopelessness of his case, for those who went in by that low dark tunnel rarely came out again.
The apartment to which he was committed was only nineteen feet in diameter, the walls eleven feet thick, and, in memory of the chivalric Earl, it is to this day called Devereux Tower. When he passed the ponderous door his brightness of soul was yet undimmed, but a short while in that chill lone chamber would subdue it to silence if not to resignation. Love of life cannot long endure in such a prison, and rapid changes in the career of soldier, statesman, courtier, had taught him the uncertainty of fortune which hangs on the caprice of king or queen.
On the 19th of the same month he and Southampton were brought to trial, and, as usual, he was unfairly treated. Even Lord Bacon, to whom he had given an estate, and who was not of the Queen's counsels, appeared against him. One lawyer compared him to a crocodile; another called him an atheist and papist, when it was well known he was a Puritan. The trial lasted from nine o'clock in the morning to six o'clock in the evening. He was sentenced to death, and on hearing it, said: "I am not a whit dismayed to receive this doom. Death is welcome to me as life. Let my poor quarters, which have done her Majesty true service in divers parts of the world, be sacrificed and disposed of at her pleasure."
As he marched through the streets to the Tower, with the edge of the headsman's axe carried toward him—the custom when prisoners were condemned to die—he walked swiftly, with his head hanging down, and made no answers to persons who frequently spoke to him from the crowds. He was allowed six more days to prepare for death. It is said that Elizabeth signed his death-warrant firmly, and with even more than the customary flourishes, but she wept and hesitated about appointing the execution.
AUTOGRAPH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH.
Meanwhile where was the gay gold ring given to him in the bloom of his youth, as he marched to Spain with the beauty of banners and roll of drums, under no shadow deeper than the folds of the royal standard? Many times Essex must have looked at the amulet, and in the long, slow waiting sickened for gracious message or friendly sign, but none came. And Elizabeth, too, must have wondered what had become of the token; and why did not he, so wildly loved and deeply mourned, send the pledge and claim the pardon?
Early one morning while this time was passing, not knowing whom to trust, he chanced to see from his window, which overlooked the street, a lad with an honest, open face, which so pleased him it won his confidence. He managed to throw down a small bribe and the ring, and told him to take it to his good cousin Lady Scroope, and she would send it to the Queen. The boy took the keepsake, but gave it into the hand of the wife of one of Essex's worst enemies, the Countess of Nottingham, who passed it to her husband.