So the time slipped away, and Elizabeth in her palace and Essex in his prison both thought bitterly of each other. The execution drew very near, and at last one day in February Essex was brought out to die. Perhaps he thought up to the last minute that a messenger would ride up carrying a pardon from the Queen; but no, no one came, and at last he laid his head on the block, and perished thinking hard things of his Queen. Not long after the Countess of Nottingham herself fell ill, and on her deathbed confessed to Elizabeth the wicked thing she had done. The knowledge that Essex had died believing her to have been faithless to her word so enraged the Queen that she said to the dying Countess: 'May God forgive you, for I never can!'
Many people spent most of their lives in the Tower. We have heard of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was here for fourteen years; but there were others imprisoned much longer. One man, a Duke of Orleans, afterwards King of France, was here for twenty-five years; and Lord Courtenay, son of the Earl of Exeter, who was of the Royal Family and descended from Edward IV., was kept in the Tower almost his whole life for fear that he might lay claim to the crown.
When the King or Queen of England used the Tower as a palace, the part they occupied was quite distinct from the prison. This part is now the Governor's house, and the Governor, who is called the Lieutenant of the Tower, lives in it. Here there are many splendid rooms, including a great council-room, where the King and his nobles used to meet for consultation. Underneath the house is a room where Lord Nithsdale was imprisoned, and the story of his escape from the Tower is one of the most exciting in all history.
In the reign of George I. a nobleman called the Earl of Nithsdale had joined in a plot to restore the Stuarts to the throne. You will remember that after the reign of James II. people said that Prince James was not his son at all, but a baby which had been adopted by the King, who had no son of his own; and as this was generally believed, after the King had been driven into exile, his daughters, the Princesses Mary and Anne, came to the throne and reigned one after the other. When they died the English crown was offered to a distant cousin, who was George I. But many English noblemen and gentlemen said that this was unfair, and that the son of James II. and his son after him should have been King. We can never tell now which was right; but all this caused a great deal of unhappiness and much fighting. Those who took up the cause of the Stuarts were called Jacobites, and among this number was the Earl of Nithsdale. He was taken prisoner, and condemned by King George to die with several others, and he was sent to the Tower, there to wait his fate.