As one after another, they were laid in their sumptuous graves the Old Guard of Elizabethan England left behind them a sovereign who, beneath her mask of perennial youthfulness and vitality, grew ever more conscious of her years and her loneliness, and a government which lost, with them, not a little of the stability which had been the fruit of their long service and ripe experience. In particular, it was the partial vacuum created by their passing which helped to raise that political whirlwind of the nineties, the career of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.

The hand which fate had dealt this last of the Tudors' over-mighty subjects was strong in two suits. There was that unique complex of charms – the beautiful face and body, the brilliant personality and style – which first captured the royal favour and then time and again recovered it after follies which would have doomed a less ornamental offender. Then there was the “noble forwardness in arms” which made its possessor the darling of the “men of action,” that significant element in the nation which the war had precipitated to the surface of affairs.