Another cause for my strong desire to see this interesting place, is to be found in its association with one of those historical personages in whom I have always taken the warmest interest. Lord Essex (whose mother was the famous Lettice Knollys, who had had for her second husband another of Queen Elizabeth's favorites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester), when confined in London, a prey to the tyranny of Elizabeth, petitioned, in one of those eloquent letters to the Virgin Queen which will always remain amongst the earliest and finest specimens of English prose, to be allowed to repair, for the benefit of his health, "to Master Comptroller's house at Grays." Ah! we can fancy, when looking over this lovely valley, with its woods, its verdure, its sweep of hills, its feeling of the near river, we can well fancy how the poet-heart of the great Earl must have longed to leave the trial, the turmoil, the jangling, the treachery, the weary fears, the bitter humiliations of his London captivity, and to taste once more the sweet air, the pleasant sights, the calmness and the quiet of the country. Hope and comfort must have come with the thought. One of the prettiest pictures that I know, is an extract from a contemporary letter, in the first volume of Mr. Craik's most interesting book, the "Romance of the Peerage," telling of the Earl and Countess, during one of the daily visits that she was at one time permitted to pay him when he was a prisoner in Essex House, walking together in the garden, "now he, now she, reading one to the other." The whole taste and feeling of the man, the daily habit of his life, is shown in this little circumstance. And this is the brave soldier who, when examined before the Privy Council, a council composed of open enemies and treacherous friends, had been kept nearly all the day kneeling at the bottom of the table. Tyranny drove him into madness, and then exacted the full penalty of the wild acts which that madness prompted. But Essex was a man in advance of his age; the companion as well as the patron of poets; the protector of papist and puritan; the fearless asserter of liberty of conscience! He deserved a truer friend than Bacon, a more merciful judge than Elizabeth. To the house of Knollys belongs another interesting association, that strangest of genealogical romances, the great case of the Banbury peerage. The cause was decided (if decided it can be called even now) by evidence found in the parish register of Rotherfield Grays.