Essex had been arrested soon after Russell, and on the same charge, that of being concerned in the Rye House Plot, and was accused of high treason. Taken from his seat at Cassiobury to the Tower, he was placed in the same room which was occupied by his father. It is described in the depositions placed before the Commissioners in William the Third’s time, as being “on the left hand as you go up the mound, after passing the Bloody Tower Gate.” In Dalrymple’s history it is stated that Essex was confined in the same room which his father, Lord Capel, had occupied, and in which Lady Essex’s grandfather, the Earl of Northumberland, had killed himself in Elizabeth’s reign. To this prison Essex was brought in the month of July in the year 1683—a year so fatal to some of England’s truest patriots—and there, as has already been stated, he was found with his throat cut. Whether Essex died by his own hand, or by the hands of others, will never be known. On the whole, the evidence points to suicide; and this is the opinion of the most trustworthy authorities, such as Green and Gardiner. Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, had been one of the most popular of the liberal leaders in the country. He had held high offices in the State, he had been Ambassador from the court of Charles II. to that of Copenhagen, he had been Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and, for a short time, Prime Minister. The only son of the gallant Lord Capel of Hadham, who had been executed by Cromwell, Essex had every reason to expect some gratitude from the son of the man for whose sake his father had given his life. But with the Stuarts the sense of gratitude was an unknown quantity, and Essex was doomed to share the fates of his friends, Russell and Sidney, accused by the same traitor who had betrayed both them and himself. On the day of Essex’s death, the King and his brother James had been visiting the Tower, a place in which neither of them had set foot for a dozen years. After James’s flight at the Revolution, it was eagerly believed that this visit was in some way connected with Essex’s death. In a curious contemporary print, Essex is seen being murdered by three well-dressed individuals, the position in which his body was found after death being also shown at the same time. In the depositions alluded to above, the sentry at the prison door stated that two men had entered the room on the morning of the Earl’s death, that an alarm was given by Essex’s valet when he found his master’s body on the floor of the closet next his bedroom with his throat cut. Two children deposed that they had seen a hand throwing a razor out of the Earl’s window, that a woman then left the house and picked it up. A sentry, named Robert Meek, who had made some remarks tending to prove that Essex had met with foul play, was found dead soon afterwards in the Tower moat. [Illustration: _Arthur Comte d’Essex_] [Illustration: _Gate and Portcullis in the Bloody Tower_]