My Lord Mountjoy was of the ancient nobility, but utterly decayed in the
support thereof, patrimony, through his grandfather’s excess, his
father’s vanity in search of the philosopher’s stone, and his brother’s
untimely prodigality; all of which seemed, by a joint conspiracy, to
ruinate the house, and altogether to annihilate it; as he came from
Oxford, he took the Inner Temple in the way to court, whither he no
sooner came, but he had a pretty kind of admission, which I have heard
from a discreet man of his own, and much more of the secrets of those
times; he was then much about twenty years of age, brown-haired, of a
sweet face, and of a most neat composure, tall in his person. The Queen
was then at Whitehall, and at dinner, whither he came to see the fashion
of the court, and the Queen had soon found him out, and, with a kind of
an affected favour, asked her carver who he was; he answered he knew him
not, insomuch that an inquiry was made, one from another, who he might
be, till at length it was told the Queen, he was brother to the Lord
William Mountjoy. Thus inquiry, with the eye of her majesty fixed upon
him, as she was wont to do, and to daunt men she knew not, stirred the
blood of the young gentleman, insomuch as his colour went and came; which
the Queen observing, called unto him, and gave him her hand to kiss,
encouraging him with gracious words, and new looks, and so diverting her
speech to the lords and ladies, she said that she no sooner observed him
but she knew there was in him some noble blood, with some other
expressions of pity towards his house; and then, again demanding his
name, she said, “Fail you not to come to the court, and I will bethink
myself, how to do you good;” and this was his inlet, and the beginning of
his grace; where it falls into consideration that, though he wanted not
wit nor courage, for he had very fine attractives, as being a good piece
of a scholar, yet were those accompanied with the retractives of
bashfulness, and natural modesty, which, as the wave of the house of his
fortune then stood, might have hindered his progression, had they not
been reinforced by the infusion of sovereign favour, and the Queen’s
gracious invitation; and that it may appear how he was, and how much that
heretic, necessity, will work in the directions of good spirits, I can
deliver it with assurance, that his exhibition was very scanty, until his
brother died, which was shortly after his admission to the court; and
then was it no more but a thousand marks _per annum_, wherewith he lived
plentifully, and in a fine garb, and without any great sustentation of
the Queen, during all her times.
And, as there was in nature a kind of backwardness, which did not
befriend him, nor suit with the motion of the court, so there was in him
an inclination to arms, with a humour of travelling and gadding abroad,
which had not some wise men about him laboured to remove, and the Queen
laid in her command, he would, out of his own native propension, marred
his own market; for as he was grown by reading, whereunto he was much
addicted, to the theory of a soldier, so was he strongly invited by his
genius, to the acquaintance of the practice of the war, which were the
causes of his excursions, for he had a company in the Low Countries, from
whom he came over with a noble acceptance of the Queen; but, somewhat
restless in honourable thoughts, he exposed himself again and again, and
would press the Queen with pretences of visiting his company so often,
till at length he had a flat denial; yet he struck over with Sir John
Norris into the action of Britanny, which was then a hot and active war,
whom he would always call his father, honouring him above all men, and
ever bewailing his end; so contrary he was in his esteem and valuation of
this great commander to that of his friend, my Lord of Essex; till at
last the Queen began to take his digressions for contempt, and confined
his residence to the court, {181} and her own presence; and, upon my Lord
of Essex’s fall, so confident she was of her own princely judgment, and
the opinion she had conceived of his worth and conduct, that she would
have this noble gentleman and none other to bring in the Irish wars to a
propitious end; for it was a prophetical speech of her own, that it would
be his fortune and his honour to cut the thread of that fatal rebellion,
and to bring her in peace to the grave; wherein she was not deceived: for
he achieved it, but with much pains and carefulness, and not without the
forces and many jealousies of the court and times, wherewith the Queen’s
age and the malignity of her settling times were replete. And so I come
to his dear friend in court, Secretary Cecil, whom, in his long absence,
he adored as his saint, and counted him his only _Mecenas_, both before
and after his departure from court, and during all the time of his
command in Ireland; well knowing that it lay in his power, and by a word
of his mouth, to make or mar him.