ke from motives purely
mercenary a villany of which the peril was so appalling; but at length
Fuentes and Ibarra, joint governors of the Netherlands, succeeded in
bribing Dr. Lopez, domestic physician to the queen, to mix poison in her
medicine. Essex, whose watchfulness over the life of his sovereign was
remarkable, whilst his intelligences were comparable in extent and
accuracy to those of Walsingham himself, was the first to give notice of
this atrocious plot. At his instance Lopez was apprehended, examined
before himself, the treasurer, the lord admiral, and Robert Cecil, and
committed to custody in the earl's house. But nothing decisive appearing
on his first examination, Robert Cecil took occasion to represent the
charge as groundless; and her majesty, sending in heat for Essex, called
him "rash and temerarious youth," and reproached him for bringing on
slight grounds so heinous a suspicion upon an innocent man. The earl,
incensed to find his diligent service thus repaid, through the
successful artifice of his enemy, quitted the presence in a paroxysm of
rage, and, according to his practice on similar occasions, shut himself
up in his chamber, which he refused to quit till the queen herself two
or three days afterwards sent the lord admiral to mediate a
reconciliation.

Further interrogatories, mingled probably with menaces of the torture,
brought Lopez to confess the fact of his having received the king of
Spain's bribe; but he persisted in denying that it was ever in his
thoughts to perpetrate the crime. This subterfuge did not, however, save
him from an ignominious death, which he shared with two other persons
whom Fuentes and Ibarra had hired for a similar undertaking.

The Spanish court disdained to return any satisfactory answer to the
complaints of Elizabeth respecting these designs against her life; but
either shame, or more likely the fear of reprisals, seems to have
deterred it from any repetition of experiments so perilous.

About two years afterwards, however, an English Jesuit named Walpole,
who was settled in Spain and intimately connected with the noted father
Parsons, instigated an attempt worthy of record, partly as a curious
instance of the exaggerated ideas then prevalent of the force of
poisons. In the last voyage of Drake to the West Indies, a small vessel
of his was captured and carried into a port of Spain, on board of which
was one Squire, formerly a purveyor for the queen's stables. With