“Asking what was fit for him to do for disposing himself to the block, and his doublet being taken off, after he had asked the executioner whether he would hinder him or no in a scarlet waistcoat, he bowed himself towards the block, and said, ‘O God, give me true humility and patience to endure to the end, and I pray you all to pray with me and for me, that when you shall see me stretch out my arms and my neck on the block, and the stroke ready to be given, it would please the everlasting God to send down his angels to carry my soul before his mercy seat,’ and then lifting up his eyes devotedly towards Heaven, he said, ‘Lord God, as unto thine altar I do come, offering up my body and my soul for a sacrifice, in humility and obedience to thy commandment, to thy ordinance, and to thy good pleasure, O God, I prostrate myself to my deserved punishment.’ Lying flat along the boards, his hand stretched out, he said, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me, thy prostrate servant,’ and therewithal fitting his head to the block, he was willed by one of the doctors to say the beginning of the 51st Psalm, Have mercy upon me, O God, etc., whereof he said two verses; the executioner being prepared he uttered these words, ‘Executioner, strike home. Come, Lord Jesus, come, Lord Jesus, and receive my soul; O Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’ In the midst of which sentence his head was severed by the axe from the corpse at three blows, but the first deadly, and depriving all sense and motion. “The noblemen present at his death were the Earls of Cumberland and Hertford, Lords Bindon, Darcy, Compton, and Thomas Howard, Constable of the Tower, Sir John Peyton, lieutenant with fifteen or sixteen partizans of the guard, and three divines, Messrs Montfort, Barlow, and Ashe Ashton.” Writing of Essex’s death, Stowe says, “The body and the head were removed into the Tower, put into a coffin ready prepared, and buried by the Earl of Arundel and Duke of Norfolk in the Church of St Peter.” The above reads as if Essex’s remains had been buried by Arundel and Norfolk, but it is of course intended to convey the fact that the body of the Earl was placed alongside their graves. There is a ghastly story told by G. S. Brandés in his work on Shakespeare, in which the Duke de Biron, Henry III. of France’s envoy to Elizabeth, relates a conversation he held with Elizabeth about Essex, in which she jested over her departed favourite; the Queen opened a box and took out of it Essex’s skull which she showed to Biron. This story has no shadow of proof or foundation, for had Essex’s head been taken out of the historic soil in which it mouldered in St Peter’s Chapel, and been given to the Queen, such an extraordinary proceeding would have been recorded; besides Elizabeth was not a monster, as such conduct with which Biron here credits her, would proclaim her to be.