Her rewards chiefly consisted in grants and leases of offices, and places of judicature; but for ready money, and in great sums, she was very sparing; which, we may partly conceive, was a virtue rather drawn out of necessity than her nature; for she had many layings-out, and as her wars were lasting, so their charge increased to the last period. And I am of opinion with Sir Walter Raleigh, that those many brave men of her times, and of the militia, tasted little more of her bounty than in her grace and good word with their due entertainment; for she ever paid her soldiers well, which was the honour of her times, and more than her great adversary of Spain could perform; so that when we come to the consideration of her FRUGALITY, the observation will be little more than that her BOUNTYand it were so woven together, that the one was {25} stained by an honourable way of sparing.
The Irish action we may call a malady, and a consumption of her times, for it accompanied her to her end; and it was of so profuse and vast an expense, that it drew near unto a distemperature of State, and of passion in herself; for, towards her last, she grew somewhat hard to please, her armies being accustomed to prosperity, and the Irish prosecution not answering her expectation, and her wonted success; for it was a good while an unthrifty and inauspicious war, which did much disturb and mislead her judgment;and the more for that it was a precedent taken out of her own pattern.
For as the Queen, by way of division, had, at her coming to the crown, supported the revolted States of Holland, so did the King of Spain turn the trick upon herself, towards her going out, by cherishing the Irish rebellion; where it falls into consideration, what the state of this kingdom and the crown revenues were then able to endure and embrace.
If we look into the establishments of those times with the best of the Irish army, counting the defeat of Blackwater, with all the precedent expenses, as it stood from my Lord of Essex's undertaking of the surrender of Kingsale, and the General Mountjoy, and somewhat after, we shall find the horse and foot troops were, for three or four years together, much about twenty thousand, besides the naval charge, which was a dependant of the same war; in that the Queen was then forced to keep in continual pay a strong fleet at sea to attend the Spanish coasts and parts, both to alarm the Spaniards, and to intercept the forces designed for the Irish assistance; so that the charge of that war alone did cost the Queen three hundred thousand pounds per annum at least, which was not the moiety of her other disbursements and expenses; which, without the public aids, the state of the royal receipts could not have much longer endured;which, out of her own frequent letters and complaints to the Deputy Mountjoy for cashiering of that list as soon as he could, might be collected, for the Queen was then driven into a strait.
We are naturally prone to applaud the times behind us, and to vilify the present; for the concurrent of her fame carries it to this day, how loyally and victoriously she lived and died, without the grudge and grievance of her people; yet the truth may appear without detraction from the honour of so great a princess. It is manifest she left more debts unpaid, taken upon credit of her privy-seals, than her progenitors did, or could have taken up, that were a hundred years before her; which was no inferior piece of State, to lay the burthen on that house {26} which was best able to bear it at a dead lift, when neither her receipts could yield her relief at the pinch, nor the urgency of her affairs endure the delays of Parliamentary assistance. And for such aids it is likewise apparent that she received more, and that with the love of her people, than any two of her predecessors that took most; which was a fortune strained out of the subjects, through the plausibility of her comportment, and (as I would say, without offence) the prodigal distribution of her grace to all sorts of subjects; for I believe no prince living, that was so tender of honour, and so exactly stood for the preservation of sovereignty, was so great a courtier of the people, yea, of the Commons, and that stooped and declined low in presenting her person to the public view, as she passed in her progress and perambulations, and in her ejaculations of her prayers on the people.
