If Elizabeth was so wrathful, even while supposing that the offer had been gratefully declined, what were likely to be her emotions when she should be informed that it had been gratefully accepted.  The Earl already began to tremble at the probable consequences of his mal-adroitness.  Grave was the error he had committed in getting himself made governor-general against orders; graver still, perhaps fatal, the blunder of not being swift to confess his fault, and cry for pardon, before other tongues should have time to aggravate his offence.  Yet even now he shrank from addressing the Queen in person, but hoped to conjure the rising storm by means of the magic wand of the Lord-Treasurer.  He implored his friend’s interposition to shield him in the emergency, and begged that at least her Majesty and the lords of council would suspend their judgment until Mr. Davison should deliver those messages and explanations with which, fully freighted, he was about to set sail from the Brill.

“If my reasons seem to your wisdoms,” said he, “other than such as might well move a true and a faithful careful man to her Majesty to do as I have done, I do desire, for my mistaking offence, to bear the burden of it; to be disavowed with all displeasure and disgrace; a matter of as great reproach and grief as ever can happen to any man.”  He begged that another person might be sent as soon as possible in his place-protesting, however, by his faith in Christ, that he had done only what he was bound to do by his regard for her Majesty’s service—­and that when he set foot in the country he had no more expected to be made Governor of the Netherlands than to be made King of Spain.  Certainly he had been paying dear for the honour, if honour it was, and he had not intended on setting forth for the Provinces to ruin himself, for the sake of an empty title.  His motives—­and he was honest, when he so avowed them—­were motives of state at least as much as of self-advancement.  “I have no cause,” he said, “to have played the fool thus far for myself; first, to have her Majesty’s displeasure, which no kingdom in the world could make me willingly deserve; next, to undo myself in my later days; to consume all that should have kept me all my life in one half year.  But I must thank God for all, and am most heartily grieved at her Majesty’s heavy displeasure.  I neither desire to live, nor to see my country with it.”

And at this bitter thought, he began to sigh like furnace, and to shed the big tears of penitence.

“For if I have not done her Majesty good service at this time,” he said, “I shall never hope to do her any, but will withdraw me into some out-corner of the world, where I will languish out the rest of my few-too many-days, praying ever for her Majesty’s long and prosperous life, and with this only comfort to live an exile, that this disgrace hath happened for no other cause but for my mere regard for her Majesty’s estate.”