complete and perfect sort as by the first intent and meaning of the King.' In it, thirty years after the first stone was laid, the Earl of Arundel entertained Queen Elizabeth and her court for a week, presenting her before she left with a costly set of plate. So greatly, indeed, did the maiden queen enjoy herself at Nonsuch that she longed to become its owner, and when a few years later it passed from the possession of her host to that of his son-in-law, Lord Lumley, she made overtures to the latter for its purchase, which had, of course, the force of a command. During the rest of her life Elizabeth was often at the palace, and from it many important state papers, and even more interesting private letters, were dated. It was there that took place the remarkable interview with her disgraced favourite, the Earl of Essex, after his return from Holland on Michaelmas Eve 1599, that {162} is so vividly described by Rowland Whyte in an oft-quoted letter to Sir Robert Sydney, in which he says: 'At about ten o'clock in the morning my Lord of Essex lighted at Court Gate in post, and made all hast up to the Presence, and so to the Privy Chamber, and stayed not till he came to the Queen's Bedchamber, where he found the Queen all newly up, the hair about her face; he kneeled unto her, kissed her hands, and had some private speech with her, which seemed to give him great contentment for coming from her Majesty to go shift himself in his chamber, he was very pleasant, and thanked God, though he had suffered much trouble amid storms abroad, he found a sweet calm at home. 'Tis much wondered at here,' comments the writer, 'that he went so boldly to her Majesty's presence, she not being ready, and he so full of dirt and mire, that his face was full of it.' It was this very boldness, as Essex knew full well, that was his one chance with his angry mistress, but this time it did not serve him long. The memory was still fresh with them both of the bitter quarrel six months before, when Elizabeth, stung to the quick by his insolent assertion that 'her conditions were as crooked as her carcase,' had boxed his ears and told him to go and be hanged, and on the very night of his arrival at Nonsuch, after the apparent reconciliation, the earl was ordered to consider himself a prisoner. A few days later he left the palace in custody, and the next year he was beheaded in the Tower, all the appeals he had addressed to the woman, to whom, in spite of all his plots against {163} her, he pretended to the last to have been devoted, having been in vain.