The attorney-general, Coke, opened the cause against him, and treated him with the cruelty and insolence which that great lawyer usually exercised against the unfortunate.

He displayed in the strongest colors all the faults committed by Essex in his administration of Ireland: his making Southampton general of the horse, contrary to the queen's injunctions; his deserting the enterprise against Tyrone, and marching to Leinster and Munster, his conferring knighthood on too many persons; his secret conference with Tyrone; and his sudden return from Ireland, in contempt of her majesty's commands.

He also exaggerated the indignity of the conditions which Tyrone had been allowed to propose; odious and abominable conditions, said he; a public toleration of an idolatrous religion, pardon for himself and every traitor in Ireland, and full restitution of lands and possessions to all of them.[*] The solicitor-general, Fleming, insisted upon the wretched situation in which the earl had left that kingdom; and Francis, son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, who had been lord keeper in the beginning of the present reign, closed the charge with displaying the undutiful expressions contained in some letters written by the earl.
* Birch's Memoirs, vol.ii.p.

449.
Essex, when he came to plead in his own defence renounced, with great submission and humility, all pretensions to an apology;[*] and declared his resolution never, on this or any other occasion, to have any contest with his sovereign.

He said, that having severed himself from the world, and abjured all sentiments of ambition, he had no scruple to confess every failing or error into which his youth, folly, or manifold infirmities might have betrayed him; that his inward sorrow for his offences against her majesty was so profound, that it exceeded all his outward crosses and afflictions, nor had he any scruple of submitting to a public confession of whatever she had been pleased to impute to him; that in his acknowledgments he retained only one reserve, which he never would relinquish but with his life, the assertion of a loyal and unpolluted heart, of an unfeigned affection, of an earnest desire ever to perform to her majesty the best service which his pool abilities would permit; and that, if this sentiment were allowed by the council, he willingly acquiesced in any condemnation or sentence which they could pronounce against him.