For Whom Shakespeare Wrote

Queen Elizabeth being dead about ten o'clock in the morning, March 24, 1603, Sir Robert Cary posted away, unsent, to King James of Scotland to inform him of the “accident, ” and got made a baron of the realm for his ride. On his way down to take possession of his new kingdom the king distributed the honor of knighthood right and left liberally; at Theobald's he created eight-and-twenty knights, of whom Sir Richard Baker, afterwards the author of “A Chronicle of the Kings of England, ” was one. “God knows how many hundreds he made the first year, ” says the chronicler, “but it was indeed fit to give vent to the passage of Honour, which during Queen Elizabeth's reign had been so stopped that scarce any county of England had knights enow to make a jury.