171.
**** See note KK, at the end of the volume.
There was also an expedient employed by Essex, which, if possible, was more provoking to the queen than those sarcasms on her age and deformity; and that was, his secret applications to the king of Scots, her heir and successor.

That prince had this year very narrowly escaped a dangerous, though ill-formed conspiracy of the earl of Gowry; and even his deliverance was attended with this disagreeable circumstance, that the obstinate ecclesiastics persisted, in spite of the most incontestable evidence, to maintain to his face, that there had been no such conspiracy.

James, harassed with his turbulent and factious subjects, cast a wishful eye to the succession of England; and in proportion as the queen advanced in years, his desire increased of mounting that throne, on which, besides acquiring a great addition of power and splendor, he hoped to govern a people so much more tractable and submissive.

He negotiated with all the courts of Europe, in order to insure himself friends and partisans: he even neglected not the court of Rome and that of Spain; and though he engaged himself in no positive promise, he flattered the Catholics with hopes that, in the event of his succession, they might expect some more liberty than was at present indulged them.

Elizabeth was the only sovereign in Europe to whom he never dared to mention his right of succession: he knew that, though her advanced age might now invite her to think of fixing an heir to the crown, she never could bear the prospect of her own death without horror, and was determined still to retain him, and all other competitors, in an entire dependence upon her.
Essex was descended by females from the royal family and some of his sanguine partisans had been so imprudent as to mention his name among those of other pretenders to the crown; but the earl took care, by means of Henry Lee, whom he secretly sent into Scotland, to assure James, that so far from entertaining such ambitious views, he was determined to use every expedient for extorting an immediate declaration in favor of that monarch's right of succession.