d from
betraying them.

Sir Henry Nevil, for having only concealed projects in which he had
absolutely refused to concur, was thus exposed to the loss of his
appointment of ambassador to France; to imprisonment, and to a long
persecution;--and lord Montjoy might have suffered even capitally, had
not his good and acceptable service in Ireland induced the queen to wink
at former offences. Cuff, the secretary of the earl, whom he sent for
to exhort him to imitate his sincerity, sternly upbraided his master
with his altered mind, and his treachery towards those who had evinced
the strongest attachment to his service: but the earl remained unmoved
by his reproaches, and calmly prepared for death in the full persuasion
that he had now worked out his own salvation.

Elizabeth had behaved on occasion of the late insurrection with all her
wonted fortitude; even at the time when Essex was actually in the city
and a false report was brought her of its revolt to him, "she was never
more amazed," says Cecil in a letter to sir George Carew, "than she
would have been to have heard of a fray in Fleet-street." But when, in
the further progress of the affair, she beheld her once loved Essex
brought to the bar for high-treason and condemned by the unanimous
verdict of his peers; when it rested solely with herself to take the
forfeit of his life or interfere by an act of special grace for his
preservation,--her grief, her agitation and her perplexity became
extreme. A sense of the many fine qualities and rare endowments of her
kinsman,--his courage, his eloquence, his generosity, and the
affectionate zeal with which he had served her:--indulgence for the
youthful impetuosity which had carried him out of the path of duty, not
unmixed with compunction for that severe and contemptuous treatment by
which she had exasperated to rebellion the spirit which mildness might
have softened into penitence and submission;--above all, the remaining
affection which still lurked at the bottom of her heart, pleaded for
mercy with a force scarcely to be withstood. On the other hand, the
ingratitude, the neglect, the insolence with which he had occasionally
treated her, and the magnitude of his offences, which daily grew upon
her by his own confessions and those of his accomplices, fatally united
to confirm the natural bias of her mind towards severity.

At this juncture Thomas Leigh, one of the dark and desperate characters
whose service Essex had used in