Lord Burleigh's instructions to him,[72] on the subject of his Scotch mission, written with his own hand, dated 10th September, 1572, especially as to getting Mary Queen of Scots out of the kingdom, and delivering her to the Regent's party, form a most interesting document. The letter closes thus: 'Herein yow shall, as Comodite shall serve yow, use all good Spede, with the most Secresy that yow can, to understand their Mynds; and yet so to deale to your uttermost, that this Matter might be rather Oppened to yow, than yourself to seme first to move it....'

Another object of his momentous mission to Scotland, as to which Elizabeth gave him her instructions with her own mouth, was to impress upon Mary Queen of Scots a sense of her faults, her duties, and her danger—a vain task! Froude gives an account of the interview, which took place after Darnley's murder. 'The windows at Holyrood were half-closed, the rooms were darkened, and in the profound gloom the English Ambassador was unable to see the Queen's face, but by her words she seemed very doleful.' And at length, having extorted from her a promise that Bothwell should be put upon his trial, Killigrew went back to London in less than a week, after having carried out his difficult and delicate duty 'like a loyal servant.'

The 'Cabala' states that when Henry Killigrew went to France, he was considered 'in livelihood much inferior to Walsingham;' but Leicester's opinion of him was subjected to revision. He says he found our hero 'a quicker and stouter fellow than he tooke him for.' I have often wondered whether this impression was derived from Sir Henry's bearing when the question of his pay was mooted. '60/ a pece, per dyem' had been set down, complains Leicester, writing to Walsingham on 15th December, 1585, as the pay of Killigrew and his colleague, whereas he had understood it was to be only 40s. The Earl's impression proved to be correct, and heart-burnings doubtless arose; with what result I know not, but Leicester's revised estimate of his man may point to the event. Sir H. Killigrew was at the siege of St. Quentin, in 1557; and Sir James Melville says how he met at La Ferre (? La Frette) 'Maister Hary Killygrew, an Englis gentleman, my auld frend, wha held my horse till I sate down in ane barbour's buith, to be pensit of the hurt in my head.'[73] He is found described, amongst the strangers resident in London in 1595 ('Nichols' Collections,' viii. 206), as living then in 'Broad Street Warde;' and he died on the 16th March, 1602/3. The character of this 'Admirable Crichton' has been so well drawn by David Lloyd in his 'State Worthies,' that I cannot refrain from giving it, in the words of Whitworth's translation.

'Travellers report, that the place wherein the body of Absalom was buried is still extant at Jerusalem, and that it is a solemn custome of pilgrims passing by it to cast a stone on the place; but a well-disposed man can hardly go by the memory of this worthy person without doing grateful homage thereunto in bestowing upon him one or two of our observations.

'It's a question sometimes whether diamond gives more lustre to the ring it's set in, or the ring to the diamond; this gentleman received honour from his family, and gave renoun to it. Writing is the character of the speech, as that is of the mind. From Tully (whose orations he could repeat to his dying day) he gained an even and apt stile, flowing at one and the selfsame height. Tully's Offices, a book which boys read, and men understand, was so esteemed of my Lord Burleigh, that to his dying day he always carried it about him, either in his bosome or his pocket, as a compleat piece that, like Aristotle's rhetorick, would make both a scholar and an honest man. Cicero's magnificent orations against Anthony, Catiline and Verres; Cæsar's great Commentaries that he wrote with the same spirit that he fought; flowing Livy; grave, judicious and stately Tacitus; eloquent, but faithful Curtius; brief and rich Salust; prudent and brave Xenophon, whose person was Themistocles his companion, as his book was Scipio Affricanus his pattern in all his wars; ancient and sweet Herodotus; sententious and observing Thucidides; various and useful Polybius; Siculus, Halicarnasseus, Trogus, Orosius, Justine, made up our young man's retinue in all his travels where (as Diodorus the Sicilian writes) he "sate on the stage of human life, observing the great circumstances of places, persons, times, manners, occasions, etc, and was made wise by their example who haue trod the path of errour and danger before him." To which he added that grave, weighty and sweet Plutarch, whose books (said Gaza) would furnish the world, were all others lost. Neither was he amazed in the labyrinth of history, but guided by the clue of cosmography, hanging his study with maps, and his mind with exact notices of each place. He made in one view a judgement of the situation, interest, and commodities (for want whereof many statemen and souldiers have[74] failed) of nations; but to understand the nature of places, is but a poor knowledge, unless we know how to improue them by art; therefore under the figures of triangles, squares, circles and magnitudes, with their terms and bounds, he could contrive most tools and instruments, most engines, and judge of fortifications, architecture, ships, wind and water-works, and whatever might make this lower frame of things useful and serviceable to mankinde; which severer studies he relieved with noble and free Poetry-aid, once the pleasure and advancement of the soul, made by those higher motions of the minde more active and more large. To which I adde her sister Musick, wherewith he revived his tired spirits, lengthened (as he said) his sickly days, opened his oppressed breast, eased his melancholy thoughts, graced his happy pronunciation, ordered and refined his irregular and gross inclinations, fixed and quickened his floating and dead notions; and by a secret, sweet and heavenly Vertue, raised his spirit, as he confessed, sometime to a little less than angelical exaltation. Curious he was to please his ear, and as exact to please his eye; there being no statues, inscriptions or coyns that the Vertuosi of Italy could shew, the antiquaries of France could boast off, or the great hoarder of rarieties the great duke of Tuscany (whose antic coyns are worth £100,000) could pretend to, that he had not the view of. No man could draw any place or work better, none fancy and paint a portraicture more lively; being a Durer for proportion, a Goltzius for a bold touch, variety of posture, a curious and true shadow, an Angelo for his happy fancy, and an Holben for works.

'Neither was it a bare ornament of discourse, or naked diversion of leisure time; but a most weighty piece of knowledge that he could blazon most noble and ancient coats, and thereby discern the relation, interest, and correspondence of great families, and thereby the meaning and bottom of all transactions, and the most successful way of dealing with any one family. His exercises were such as his employments were like to be, gentle and man-like. Whereof the two most eminent were riding and shooting that at once wholesomely stirred, and nobly knitted and strengthened his body. Two eyes he said he travelled with; the one of wariness upon himself, the other of observation upon others. This compleat gentleman was guardian to the young Brandon in his younger years, agent for Sir John Mason in king Edward the sixth's time, and the first embassador for the state in Queen Elizabeth's time. My Lord Cobham is to amuse the Spaniard, my Lord Effingham to undermine the French, and Sir Henry Killigrew is privately sent to engage the German princes against Austria in point of interest, and for her majesty in point of religion: he had a humour that bewitched the elector of Bavaria, a carriage that awed him of Mentz, a reputation that obliged them of Colen and Hydelberg, and that reach and fluency in discourse that won them all. He assisted the Lords Hunsdon and Howard at the treaty with France in London, and my Lord of Essex in the war for France and Britain. Neither was he less observable for his own conduct than for that of others, whose severe thoughts, words and carriage so awed his inferiour faculties, as to restrain him through all the heats of youth, made more than usually importunate by the full vigour of a high and sanguine constitution; insomuch that they say he looked upon all the approaches to that sin, then so familiar to his calling as a souldier, his quality as a gentleman, and his station as a courtier, not onely with an utter disallowance in his judgement, but with a natural abhorrency and antipathy in his very lower inclinations. To which happiness it conduced not a little, that though he had a good, yet he had a restrained appetite (a knife upon his throat as well as upon his trencher) that indulged itself neither frequent nor delicate entertainment; its meals, though but once a day, being its pressures, and its fast, its only sensualities; to which temperance in diet, adde but that in sleep, together with his disposal of himself throughout his life to industry and diligence, you will say he was a spotless man, whose life taught us this lesson, (which, if observed, would accomplish mankinde; and which King Charles the first would inculcate to noble travellers, and Dr. Hammond to all men), viz.: To be furnished always with something to do; a lesson they proposed as the best expedience for innocence and pleasure; the foresaid blessed man assuring his happy hearers, "That no burden is more heavy, or temptation more dangerous, then to have time lie on one's hand: the idle man being not onely" (as he worded it) "the Devil's shop, but his kingdome too; a model of, and an appendage unto Hell, a place given up to torment and to mischief."'

He left four daughters only, Anna, Dorothy, Elizabeth, and Mary, by his wife Katherine, fourth of the erudite daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, of Giddy Hall, Essex, the accomplished Preceptor of Edward VI.—'vir antiqua serenitate,' according to Camden—from whom (as Strype tells us) his 'daughter Killigrew' inherited, amongst other things, 'a nest of white bowls.'

Dame Katherine was skilled, after the manner of the learned ladies of her time, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and in poetry; and both Sir John Harrington and Thomas Fuller commend and quote her compositions. But that, with all her learning, she had, what was even better, a devotedly affectionate heart, let the following lines testify, which she addressed to her sister Mildred, who had married Cecil, Lord Burghley.[75] The Lord Treasurer was about to send his young relative on a diplomatic mission to France, at a dangerous juncture—whether before or after the death in that country of Thomas Hobby, who married her sister Elizabeth, and who also went to France as an ambassador, I am uncertain—while the loving Katherine thought her husband would be safer and happier with her in Cornwall—probably either at Arwenack, or at Rosmeryn in Budock, or at Trevose in Mawgan, or at Penwerris, at all of which places were estates of the Killigrews. The dauntless wife thus threatens Elizabeth's solemn First Minister:

'Si mihi quem cupio cures Mildreda remitti
Tu bona, tu melior, tu mihi sola soror:
Sin male cessando retines, et trans mare mittis,
Tu mala, tu pejor, tu mihi nulla soror.
Is si Cornubiam, tibi pax sit et omnia læta,
Sin Mare, Ciciliæ nuncio bella. Vale.'

Of which, for the benefit of (some few at least of) my lady readers in these later days, I have appended Fuller's harsh translation: