How long, in spite of the above fulsome letter, the Queen would have kept “her love-stricken swain,” as Raleigh called himself, within the Tower there is no knowing, if it had not been for the accident of his good ship, the _Roebuck_—which had escaped from the Spanish fleet sent to capture her—falling in, off Flores, with some great East Indian carracks bound for Lisbon. When the _Roebuck_ had taken the great Spanish ship, the _Madre de Dios_ and brought her into Dartmouth with a huge treasure on board, which Raleigh himself estimated at half-a-million pounds, Elizabeth’s covetousness completely overmastered her resentment, and “her love-stricken swain” was set at liberty in September 1592, to arrange the disposal of the Spanish treasure—of which the Queen took the lion’s share. Two attempts to poison Elizabeth were discovered in 1594. The first of these dastardly schemes was concocted by the Queen’s physician, a Spaniard or Portuguese named Lopez, who had been bribed by the Spanish governors of the Netherlands, Fuentes and Ibara, to administer poison to his royal mistress in some medicine. This plot is said to have been discovered by Essex. Lopez and two of his confederates met the fate they deserved, after being imprisoned in the Tower. According to Camden, Lopez declared on the scaffold that “He loved the Queen as much as he did Jesus Christ.” This sentiment coming from a Jew was received with much merriment by the spectators at the execution. The second plot was much more curious. Walpole, a Jesuit priest, had bribed a groom in the royal stables, named Edward Squire, to rub some poison on the pommel of the Queen’s saddle, but, as may be supposed, the poison had no harmful effect, and priest and groom, being convicted, were hanged at Tyburn. The last year of the sixteenth century saw the fall of one of Elizabeth’s most brilliant courtiers, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. After forty years of stern repression, Ireland, towards the close of Elizabeth’s reign, had become more Irish than ever. All the cruelties committed in that country by the Government of the Queen, cruelties in which Raleigh played so flagrant a part, had not crushed the Irish, and a larger army of occupation was found necessary. Essex and Raleigh were bitter enemies. The chief cause of their dissension was the treatment of the Irish, Raleigh advising that they should be completely trodden under foot, whilst Essex urged a show of justice and some degree of goodwill towards the country and its inhabitants; but the favour shown by the Queen to both these remarkable men was also an additional cause for their mutual jealousy. Both were extremely self-willed, and their immense egotism, and lust for place and power, was the common ruin of each of them. Essex was the youngest and last of that brilliant combination of soldier, statesman, and courtier, that added to the glory and charm of those “spacious days.”