Elizabeth died in her palace at Richmond, in the seventieth year of her age, about three o’clock in the morning of Thursday the 24th of March 1602 (so in the English reckoning, but in the Scottish it was 1603), after an illness of some days, during the first four of which she lay in great pain on cushions, and partly delirious, refusing to go to bed or to take any food. Her Councillors, Secretary Cecil and Archbishop Whitgift among them, had been in attendance from the first; and they had contrived, on the day before her death, while she was lying speechless in the bed into which they had at last forced her, to extract a sign from her which intimated her consent that James should be her successor, or which they found it convenient to construe to that effect. No sooner was she dead than there was a meeting of the Council in an apartment near that in which the corpse lay, to draft a proclamation of James as the new sovereign, and to take other measures necessary in the crisis. Secrecy was essential for a few hours; and, as the palace was full of people, including the weeping court-ladies and others not of the Council, there were orders that the gates should be shut, and that no one should be permitted either to leave the palace or to enter it without special warrant. One person managed to evade the order and get in. This was the Sir Robert Cary of whom we have just heard. He was then a man of about forty-three years of age, and well known at Court, both from his high family connections and on his own account. His father, the late Lord Hunsdon, had been distinguished among Elizabeth’s councillors by being related to her by cousinship; his brother, the present Lord Hunsdon, was now of the Council; and a sister of his, Lady Scroope, was one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. His own services in the Queen’s employment had been very various and had extended over many years. Among diplomatic missions on which she had sent him in his youth had been several to King James in Scotland; and latterly he had been in charge of one of the English wardenships on the Scottish Borders, and conspicuous for his vigour in the garrisoned defence of those northern parts of England against the cattle-lifting raids of their rough Scottish neighbours. While in this post, he had incurred the Queen’s disfavour by marrying,—a fault which she always resented in any of her courtiers; and for a while she had refused to see him or speak with him. He had contrived, however, to pacify her in a skilfully obtained interview; and that cloud had blown over. Hence, having come south on furlough from his wardenship just about the time when the Queen was seized with her fatal illness, and having taken lodgings in Richmond to await the issue, he had been admitted easily enough into the dying Queen’s presence. “When I came to Court,” he tells us, “I found the Queen ill-disposed, and she kept her inner lodging; yet she, hearing of my arrival, sent for me. I found her