At His Return From The Cadiz Voyage And Action, She
Conferred It Upon Him, Creating Him Earl Of Nottingham, To
The great
discontent of his colleague, my Lord of Essex, who then grew
excessive in the appetite of her favour,
And the truth is, so
exorbitant in the limitation of the sovereign aspect, that it much
alienated the Queen's grace from him, and drew others together with
the Admiral to a combination, to conspire his ruin; and though, as I
have heard it from that party (I mean the old Admiral's faction)
that it lay not in his proper power to hurt my Lord Essex, yet he
had more fellows, and such as were well skilled in the setting of
the train; but I leave this to those of another age; it is out of
doubt that the Admiral was a good, honest, and brave man, and a
faithful servant to his mistress; and such a one as the Queen, out
of her own princely judgment, knew to be a fit instrument in her
service, for she was a proficient in the reading of men as well as
books; and as sundry expeditions, as that aforementioned, and '88,
do better express his worth and manifest the Queen's trust, and the
opinion she had of his fidelity and conduct.
Moreover, the Howards were of the Queen's alliance and consanguinity
by her mother, which swayed her affection and bent it toward this
great house; and it was a part of her natural propensity to grace
and support ancient nobility, where it did not entrench, neither
invade her interest; from such trespasses she was quick and tender,
and would not spare any whatsoever, as we may observe in the case of
the duke and my Lord of Hertford, whom she much favoured and
countenanced, till they attempted the forbidden fruit, the fault of
the last being, in the severest interpretation, but a trespass of
encroachment; but in the first it was taken as a riot against the
Crown and her own sovereign power, and as I have ever thought the
cause of her aversion against the rest of that house, and the duke's
great father-in-law, Fitz-Allen, Earl of Arundel, a person in the
first rank of her affections, before these and some other jealousies
made a separation between them:
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