sooner or later, to make him, being what he was, plunge into a fatal and irretrievable mistake.  He was treated as a cat treats a mouse; he was worried, confined, disgraced, publicly reprimanded, brought just within verge of the charge of treason, but not quite, just enough to discredit and alarm him, but to leave him still a certain amount of play.  He was made to see that the Queen’s favour was not quite hopeless; but that nothing but the most absolute and unreserved humiliation could recover it.  It was plain to any one who knew Essex that this treatment would drive Essex to madness.  “These same gradations of yours”—­so Bacon represents himself expostulating with the Queen on her caprices—­“are fitter to corrupt than to correct any mind of greatness.”  They made Essex desperate; he became frightened for his life, and he had reason to be so, though not in the way which he feared.  At length came the stupid and ridiculous outbreak of the 8th of February, 1600/1601, a plot to seize the palace and raise the city against the ministers, by the help of a few gentlemen armed only with their rapiers.  As Bacon himself told the Queen, “if some base and cruel-minded persons had entered into such an action, it might have caused much blow and combustion; but it appeared well that they were such as knew not how to play the malefactors!” But it was sufficient to bring Essex within the doom of treason.

Essex knew well what the stake was.  He lost it, and deserved to lose it, little as his enemies deserved to win it; for they, too, were doing what would have cost them their heads if Elizabeth had known it—­corresponding, as Essex was accused of doing, with Scotland about the succession, and possibly with Spain.  But they were playing cautiously and craftily; he with bungling passion.  He had been so long accustomed to power and place, that he could not endure that rivals should keep him out of it.  They were content to have their own way, while affecting to be the humblest of servants; he would be nothing less than a Mayor of the Palace.  He was guilty of a great public crime, as every man is who appeals to arms for anything short of the most sacred cause.  He was bringing into England, which had settled down into peaceable ways, an imitation of the violent methods of France and the Guises.  But the crime as well as the penalty belonged to the age, and crimes legally said to be against the State mean morally very different things, according to the state of society and opinion.  It is an unfairness verging on the ridiculous, when the ground is elaborately laid for keeping up the impression that Essex was preparing a real treason against the Queen like that of Norfolk.  It was a treason of the same sort and order as that for which Northumberland sent Somerset to the block:  the treason of being an unsuccessful rival.