When Queen Mary visited her sister at Hatfield, Elizabeth adorned her great state chamber for Her Majesty's reception, with a sumptuous suite of tapestry, representing the Siege of Antioch, and had a play performed after supper, by the choir-boys of St. Paul's; at the conclusion of which one of the children sang, and was accompanied on the virginals by the Princess herself. Hatfield, during Elizabeth's reign, remained vested in the crown. At her decease, however, her successor, King James, exchanged it with Sir Robert Cecil for the palace of Theobalds, and thenceforward Hatfield has continued uninterruptedly in the possession of the noble family of Salisbury. Sir Robert Cecil was styled by his royal mistress, Elizabeth, "the staff of her declining age," and was so highly esteemed by King James, that his Majesty created him successively Baron Cecil, Viscount Cranbourne, and Earl of Salisbury; conferred on him the blue riband of the Garter, and finally appointed him Lord High Treasurer of England. About this period, his lordship laid the foundations of the present mansion of Hatfield, which he finished in 1611, in a style of equal splendour with that of Burghley, which his father had erected in the preceding reign. The year after the completion of Hatfield, worn out by the cares of state the Earl of Salisbury died at Marlborough, in Wiltshire, on his way to London: he was interred in Hatfield Church, under a stately monument. How striking an example does the closing year of his life present! In his last illness, he was heard to say to Sir William Cope: "Ease and pleasure quake to hear of death; but my life, full of care and miseries, desireth to be dissolved." He had some years previously (1603) addressed a letter to Sir James Harrington, the poet, in nearly the same querulous tone: "Good Knight," saith the minister, "rest content, and give heed to one that hath sorrowed in the bright lustre of a court, and gone heavily on even the best seeming fair ground. 'Tis a great task to prove one's honesty, and yet not mar one's fortune: you have tasted a little thereof in our blessed Queen's time, who was more than a woman, and, in truth, sometimes less than a woman. I wish I waited now in your presence-chamber, with ease at my food, and rest in my bed. I am pushed from the share of comfort, and know not where the winds and waves of a court will bear me. I know it bringeth little comfort on earth; and he is, I reckon, no wise man that looketh this way to heaven."