130 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January played a significant part in the campaign which ended fatally off the island of Flores for Sir Richard Grenville and the Revenge. In 1592 the assistance of his ships in the capture of the Madre de Dios brought £36,000 to the family exchequer, which by this time was sadly depleted ; and financial success encouraged the earl to put forth fresh endeavours. After the death of Drake, however, he took a more serious view of the war ; and, resolving to ' plant a thorn in the Spanish foot ', captured Porto Rico in the West Indies. The exploit was one of the most brilliant of the Elizabethan age, and deserved better than that the virgin fortress should be abandoned almost as soon as it was captured. But the age of Elizabeth was drawing to its close. On his return to England, Cumberland dutifully supported the Crown during Essex's rebellion, and was made a commissioner for the errant favourite's trial. On the accession of James, he won the royal favour by his sumptuous hospitality, and was admitted of the privy council. He died at the age of forty-seven in 1605. All this, or most of it, has long been common knowledge, for Cumber- land's deeds have been faithfully chronicled not only by Hakluyt and Purchas, but by that erratic and cross-grained genius Sir William Monson, who was bound to the earl by some indefinable tie, and whose Tracts form the earliest contribution of a naval officer to the literature of his profession. Dr. Williamson, however, has widely extended the range of original documents bearing upon Cumberland's career. The earl, it seems, in order that his voyages might be fitly commemorated, employed as scribe one Richard Robinson, of whom little is known beyond the fact that he was a friend of the poet Churchyard. Robinson's principal work, The Nine Memorable Voyages made by the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Cumberland, survives in manuscript at Appleby Castle, and there are replicas of the work at Lambeth Palace and in the possession of Lady Desborough. A composition by the same author, An English Quid for a Spanish Quo, having for its main theme the descent on Cadiz in 1596, survives in two copies, one in the royal collection, and another in the possession of Sir S. P. M. Maryon- Wilson. These were doubtless passed in review by the earl of Cumberland in person. After his death they were utilized by his daughter, Lady Anne Clifford, countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery, as material for a more ambitious chronicle of her father's achievements. The resulting Brief Relation of the Several Voyages, com- pleted in 1619, at present belongs to Mrs. Leveson-Gower of Bill Hill, near Wokingham. There is, in addition to an abridgement of this manuscript in the same ownership, a contemporary copy at Appleby Castle. Lady Anne Clifford, as Dr. Williamson has shown in a previous biography, was kept out of her father's estates for many years ; and, when she was still battling for them, prepared in support of her claim three ponderous folio volumes of family records which recount all that could be discovered concerning the earl prior to 1653. Finally, in addition to these more formal compilations, Dr. Williamson has unearthed at Skipton Castle and elsewhere a series of letters from Cumberland's own hand, written in chief to his virtuous and talented wife, to whom, after an unhappy estrangement, he was reconciled on his death-bed. These epistles, which
