power to incur an
immense additional expense for the protection of her treasure-ships and
settlements. But the benefit to England was comparatively trifling; and
to the earl himself, notwithstanding occasional captures of great value,
his voyages were far from producing any lasting advantage; they scarcely
repaid on the whole the cost of equipment; while the influx of sudden
wealth with which they sometimes gratified him, only ministered food to
that magnificent profusion in which he finally squandered both his
acquisitions and his patrimony. None of the liberal and enlightened
views which had prompted the efforts of the great navigators of this and
a preceding age appear to have had any share in the enterprises of the
earl of Cumberland. Even the thirst of martial glory seems in him to
have been subordinate to the love of gain, and that appetite for rapine
to which his loose and extravagant habits had given the force of a
passion.

He had formed, early in life, an attachment to the beautiful daughter of
that worthy character and rare exemplar of old English hospitality, sir
William Holles, ancestor to the earls of Clare of that surname; but her
father, from a singular pride of independence, refused to listen to his
proposals, saying "that he would not have to stand cap in hand to his
son-in-law; his daughter should marry a good gentleman with whom he
might have society and friendship." Disappointed thus of the object of
his affections, he matched himself with a daughter of the earl of
Bedford; a woman of merit, as it appears, but whom their mutual
indifference precluded from exerting over him any salutary influence. As
a husband, he proved both unfaithful and cruel; and separating himself
after a few years from his countess, on pretence of incompatibility of
tempers, he suffered her to pine not only in desertion, but in poverty.
We shall hereafter have occasion to view this celebrated earl in the
idly-solemn personage of queen's champion; meantime, he must be
dismissed with no more of applause than may be challenged by a character
signally deficient in the guiding and restraining virtues, and endowed
with such a share only of the more active ones as served to render it
conspicuous and glittering rather than truly and permanently
illustrious.

Henry earl of Northumberland likewise joined the fleet, on-board a
vessel hired by himself. Immediately after the fatal catastrophe of his
father in 1585, this young nobleman, a