My Lord of Effingham, though a courtier betimes, yet I find not that the
sunshine of his favour broke out upon him until she took him into the
ship and made him High Admiral of England. For his extract, it might
suffice that he was the son of a Howard, and of a Duke of Norfolk.
And, for his person, as goodly a gentleman as the times had any, if
Nature had not been more intentive to complete his person, than Fortune
to make him rich; for, the times considered, which were then active, and
a long time after lucrative, he died not wealthy; yet the honester man,
though it seems the Queen’s purpose was to render the occasion of his
advancement, and to make him capable of more honour. At his return from
the Cadiz voyage and action, she conferred it upon him, creating him Earl
of Nottingham, to the great discontent of his colleague, my Lord of
Essex, who then grew excessive in the appetite of her favour, and the
truth is, so exorbitant in the limitation of the sovereign aspect, that
it much alienated the Queen’s grace from him, and drew others together
with the Admiral to a combination, to conspire his ruin; and though, as I
have heard it from that party (I mean the old Admiral’s faction) that it
lay not in his proper power to hurt my Lord Essex, yet he had more
fellows, and such as were well skilled in the setting of the train; but I
leave this to those of another age; it is out of doubt that the Admiral
was a good, honest, and brave man, and a faithful servant to his
mistress; and such a one as the Queen, out of her own princely judgment,
knew to be a fit instrument in her service, for she was a proficient in
the reading of men as well as books; and as sundry expeditions, as that
aforementioned, and ’88, do better express his worth and manifest the
Queen’s trust, and the opinion she had of his fidelity and conduct.
Moreover, the Howards were of the Queen’s alliance and consanguinity by
her mother, which swayed her affection and bent it toward this great
house; and it was a part of her natural propensity to grace and support
ancient nobility, where it did not entrench, neither invade her interest;
from such trespasses she was quick and tender, and would not spare any
whatsoever, as we may observe in the case of the duke and my Lord of
Hertford, whom she much favoured and countenanced, till they attempted
the forbidden fruit, the fault of the last being, in the severest
interpretation, but a trespass of encroachment; but in the first it was
taken as a riot against the Crown and her own sovereign power, and as I
have ever thought the cause of her aversion against the rest of that
house, and the duke’s great father-in-law, Fitz-Allen, Earl of Arundel, a
person in the first rank of her affections, before these and some other
jealousies made a separation between them: this noble lord and Lord
Thomas Howard, since Earl of Suffolk, standing alone in her grace, and
the rest in her umbrage.