choking
sensation, and the ghosts of her murdered sister--Mary, Queen of Scots, and
her former lover, the beheaded Earl of Essex, appeared nightly.

Cecil asked her a few days before she died how she felt, when she muttered,
"My lord, I am tied with a chain of iron about my neck."

Thus a cruel, bloody conscience sat like a fiend over her dying sighs and
groans, and though surrounded with the wealth and glory of the world, the
Virgin Queen stepped into eternity with only the memory of a successful
tyrant to light her to the Pluto realms of her father, King Henry the
Eighth!

Her funeral procession and burial in Westminster Abbey was the grandest
exhibition of royal pomp and magnificence. The whole population seemed to
fill all the alleys, streets and parks of the great city, with the army and
navy leading the funeral cortege, while the great bells from steeple, tower
and temple rang out their periodical wail of sonorous sounds for
twenty-four hours.

The body of Elizabeth had been scarcely cold in death when Lord Cecil and
the Royal Council proclaimed James of Scotland, King of England, Ireland,
Scotland and France, tumbling over each other in a mad race to throw
themselves prostrate before the rising sun, forgetting in a day the honors
and benefactions showered upon them for forty years by their late mistress.

_And thus we see from age to age,
The greed of man on every page;
No matter whether young or old,
His strife in life is search for gold!_

King James left Edinburgh on the 5th of April with a royal escort for
London, and by easy stage from town to town and castle to castle, made a
triumphal march to London, where he arrived on the 7th of May, 1603,
putting up at the Whitehall Palace. The lords of the realm and millions of
faithful subjects gave James their loyal adhesion and support, lauding him
to the skies as monarch of the realm and defender of the Faith. Hope had no
thorns in her crown.

Protestants and Catholics alike, on their first rush of spontaneous
patriotism, made a bid for the patronage of the new king, who, although
reared a Protestant, was known to have sympathy for certain Catholic lords,
who tried to save his mother--Mary, Queen of Scots, from the fatal block.
James never forgave Elizabeth for the murder of his mother, and in his
inmost heart despised his predecessor.

King James after his coronation and triumphal entry into London on the 15th
of March, 1604, ordered a p