shall
hear her majesty's sickness and manner of death diversly reported; for
even here the papists do tell strange stories, as utterly void of truth
as of all civil honesty or humanity.... Here was some whispering that
her brain was somewhat distempered, but there was no such matter; only
she held an obstinate silence for the most part; and, because she had a
persuasion that if she once lay down she should never rise, could not be
got to go to bed in a whole week, till three days before her death....
She made no will, neither gave any thing away; so that they which come
after shall find a well-furnished jewel-house and a rich wardrobe of
more than two thousand gowns, with all things else answerable[144]."

[Note 144: Printed in Nichols's Progresses.]

That a profound melancholy was either the cause, or at least a leading
symptom, of the last illness of the queen, so many concurring
testimonies render indisputable; but the origin of this affection has
been variously explained. Some, as we have seen, ascribed it to her
chagrin on being in a manner compelled to grant the pardon of Tyrone;--a
cause disproportioned surely to the effect. Others have imagined it to
arise from grief and indignation at the neglect which she began to
experience from the venal throng of courtiers, who were hastening to pay
timely homage to her successor. By others, again, her dejection has
been regarded as nothing more than a natural concomitant of bodily
decay; a physical rather than a mental malady. But the prevalent
opinion, even at the time, appears to have been, that the grief or
compunction for the death of Essex, with which she had long maintained a
secret struggle, broke forth in the end superior to control, and rapidly
completed the overthrow of powers which the advances of old age and an
accumulation of cares and anxieties had already undermined. "Our queen,"
writes an English correspondent to a Scotch nobleman in the service of
James, "is troubled with a rheum in her arm, which vexeth her very much,
besides the grief she hath conceived for my lord of Essex's death. She
sleepeth not so much by day as she used, neither taketh rest by night.
Her delight is to sit in the dark, and sometimes, with shedding tears,
to bewail Essex."

A remarkable anecdote first published in Osborn's Traditional Memoirs of
Queen Elizabeth, and confirmed by M. Maurier's Memoirs,--where it is
given on the authority of sir Dudley Carleton the English ambassador