MONTGOMERY.The next,and a much more famous one,was ROBERT CARR,or KER (for it is not certain which was his right name),who came from the Border country,and whom he soon made VISCOUNT ROCHESTER,and afterwards,EARL OF SOMERSET.The way in which his Sowship doted on this handsome young man,is even more odious to think of,than the way in which the really great men of England condescended to bow down before him.The favourite's great friend was a certain SIR THOMAS OVERBURY,who wrote his love-letters for him,and assisted him in the duties of his many high places,which his own ignorance prevented him from discharging.But this same Sir Thomas having just manhood enough to dissuade the favourite from a wicked marriage with the beautiful Countess of Essex,who was to get a divorce from her husband for the purpose,the said Countess,in her rage,got Sir Thomas put into the Tower,and there poisoned him.
Then the favourite and this bad woman were publicly married by the King's pet bishop,with as much to-do and rejoicing,as if he had been the best man,and she the best woman,upon the face of the earth.
But,after a longer sunshine than might have been expected-of seven years or so,that is to say-another handsome young man started up and eclipsed the EARL OF SOMERSET.This was GEORGE VILLIERS,the youngest son of a Leicestershire gentleman:who came to Court with all the Paris fashions on him,and could dance as well as the best mountebank that ever was seen.He soon danced himself into the good graces of his Sowship,and danced the other favourite out of favour.Then,it was all at once discovered that the Earl and Countess of Somerset had not deserved all those great promotions and mighty rejoicings,and they were separately tried for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury,and for other crimes.But,the King was so afraid of his late favourite's publicly telling some disgraceful things he knew of him-which he darkly threatened to do-that he was even examined with two men standing,one on either side of him,each with a cloak in his hand,ready to throw it over his head and stop his mouth if he should break out with what he had it in his power to tell.So,a very lame affair was purposely made of the trial,and his punishment was an allowance of four thousand pounds a year in retirement,while the Countess was pardoned,and allowed to pass into retirement too.They hated one another by this time,and lived to revile and torment each other some years.
While these events were in progress,and while his Sowship was making such an exhibition of himself,from day to day and from year to year,as is not often seen in any sty,three remarkable deaths took place in England.The first was that of the Minister,Robert Cecil,Earl of Salisbury,who was past sixty,and had never been strong,being deformed from his birth.He said at last that he had no wish to live;and no Minister need have had,with his experience of the meanness and wickedness of those disgraceful times.The second was that of the Lady Arabella Stuart,who alarmed his Sowship mightily,by privately marrying WILLIAM SEYMOUR,son of LORD BEAUCHAMP,who was a descendant of King Henry the Seventh,and who,his Sowship thought,might consequently increase and strengthen any claim she might one day set up to the throne.She was separated from her husband (who was put in the Tower)and thrust into a boat to be confined at Durham.She escaped in a man's dress to get away in a French ship from Gravesend to France,but unhappily missed her husband,who had escaped too,and was soon taken.She went raving mad in the miserable Tower,and died there after four years.The last,and the most important of these three deaths,was that of Prince Henry,the heir to the throne,in the nineteenth year of his age.He was a promising young prince,and greatly liked;a quiet,well-conducted youth,of whom two very good things are known:first,that his father was jealous of him;
Secondly,that he was the friend of Sir Walter Raleigh,languishing through all those years in the Tower,and often said that no man but his father would keep such a bird in such a cage.On the occasion of the preparations for the marriage of his sister the Princess Elizabeth with a foreign prince (and an unhappy marriage it turned out),he came from Richmond,where he had been very ill,to greet his new brother-in-law,at the palace at Whitehall.There he played a great game at tennis,in his shirt,though it was very cold weather,and was seized with an alarming illness,and died within a fortnight of a putrid fever.For this young prince Sir Walter Raleigh wrote,in his prison in the Tower,the beginning of a History of the World:a wonderful instance how little his Sowship could do to confine a great man's mind,however long he might imprison his body.
And this mention of Sir Walter Raleigh,who had many faults,but who never showed so many merits as in trouble and adversity,may bring me at once to the end of his sad story.After an imprisonment in the Tower of twelve long years,he proposed to resume those old sea voyages of his,and to go to South America in search of gold.His Sowship,divided between his wish to be on good terms with the Spaniards through whose territory Sir Walter must pass (he had long had an idea of marrying Prince Henry to a Spanish Princess),and his avaricious eagerness to get hold of the gold,did not know what to do.But,in the end,he set Sir Walter free,taking securities for his return;and Sir Walter fitted out an expedition at his own coast and,on the twenty-eighth of March,one thousand six hundred and seventeen,sailed away in command of one of its ships,which he ominously called the Destiny.The expedition failed;the common men,not finding the gold they had expected,mutinied;a quarrel broke out between Sir Walter and the Spaniards,who hated him for old successes of his against them;and he took and burnt a little town called SAINT THOMAS.For this he was denounced to his Sowship by the Spanish Ambassador as a pirate;