saying Essex was not to suffer until the next day. That night, she sent two hangmen to carry out the sentence. 'If one faint, the other may perform it for him.' Then she shut herself in her rooms and stayed there until it was all over.
In the early hours of 25 February 1601, a small group of people arrived at the Tower to watch Essex die. They sat on seats around the scaffold, which was in front of the House of Ordnance, as Anne Boleyn's scaffold had been. Aided by three churchmen, Essex was brought out at eight o'clock. He wore a black velvet gown and breeches and a black felt hat. He climbed the steps, took off his hat and bowed to those watching. Then he made his speech.
'My sins are more in number than the hairs on my head,' he said. 'I have been puffed up with pride.' He asked Christ to pardon him, and spoke of 'my last sin, this great, this bloody, this crying sin', which had brought him and his friends to ruin. 'I beseech God to forgive us, and to forgive it me, most wretched of all.' He ended by praying God to save the Queen, 'whose death I never meant'.
Now he took off his gown and ruff, and knelt by the block, saying aloud the Lord's Prayer and the Creed. The headsman knelt and asked Essex's pardon, which he gave. Essex rose, then bowed to the block and laid himself down over it. He said he would be ready when he held out his arms.
'Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!' he cried, twisting his head to the side. Then he cried, 'Strike home!' and flung out his arms, still praying. It took three chops to cut off his head, but he seems to have been killed by the first, as his body did not move after it. The headsman swung the head up by the hair and shouted, 'God save the Queen!'
Essex's death was mourned by many of the common people, who made up songs about him, such as 'Sweet England's Pride is Gone'. But Elizabeth never showed any regret for sending Essex to the block, for she felt she had been just in doing so, and that her realm was safer without him. Yet she would always think of him with sadness. Until her own death in March 1603, she would wear a ring he had given her.
Three hundred years later, the writer and statesman, Lord Macaulay, would visit the chapel of St Peter in the Tower of London and gaze upon the altar pavement. Beneath it had been buried the bodies of six of those 'traitors' who had lost their heads in the Tower. Macaulay was much moved, and wrote, 'There is no sadder spot on Earth.'
