proves
that he thought of Irish administration as a weapon of combat for Court
ascendency, not as a means of correcting the wrongs of ages. The tone of
his tirades upon his condemnation to residence in Ireland is wholly
inconsistent with the romantic theory that he had undertaken the
government as a humanitarian mission of peace and benevolence to the
Celt.

[Sidenote: _Despair and Cabals._]

His abrupt return was but the climax in a series of extravagances which
had terrified the Queen. He was indignant at any delay in a restoration
of the old royal kindness. At first he condescended to a few overtures
for forgiveness. His friends could not believe that he would not be
welcomed back. They were persuaded that, if Elizabeth saw him, all would
be as it had been. Leave was importuned for him to run again in the ring
at Whitehall on the Queen's birthday. He was induced to affect
penitence. It was noted hopefully that the royal favour to Ralegh was
not without breaks. He had wished to be a Commissioner for the peace
negotiations with Spain at Boulogne. The Queen refused, as his
appointment would have confirmed his title to a Privy Councillorship. In
June he was said to have been scolded worse than cat and dog, and
dismissed into the country bag and baggage. Obediently he went over to
his Cork estate, where he aided Carew in his Munster Presidency with his
'strong counsel' in July. As before, he kept his temper, and the Queen
relented. She sent comforting messages when he fell ill from vexation,
as was said, and recalled him to Court. Essex was not content to work
upon her compassion. He grew contemptuously impatient. He was much more
resentful than grateful when his pardon came without a renewal of his
farm of sweet wines. Everybody has heard of his rude taunt thereupon at
Elizabeth, that 'her conditions were as crooked as her carcase.' Ralegh
in his _Prerogative of Parliaments_ applies it as an illustration how
'undutiful words of a subject do often take deeper root than the memory
of ill deeds.' He asserts that the saying 'cost the Earl his head, which
his insurrection had not cost him, but for that speech.' Essex did not
stop at sneers. He caballed with persecuted Papists and Puritans alike,
and with various desperados. He alarmed King James with fantastic
accounts of conspiracies for the Infanta's succession. In the plot were,
he intimated, Ralegh potent in the West and Channel Islands; Cobham,
Warden of the Cinque Por