Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/438

424 with Elizabeth, in personal interview, fully and candidly as to the person that she would really recommend as her consort. Sir James was an able diplomatist, who had travelled, and seen much of men and courts. He had, as we have seen, been commissioned to forward the suit of Hans Casimir, son of the Elector Palatine, to Elizabeth, and had taken a very clear view of her character. Perhaps no man, who was only an occasional visitor of her court, so thoroughly understood her weak points. These are made most conspicuous in the narrative which he has left of those interviews which he had with her.

Elizabeth received him at her palace at Westminster, at eight o'clock, in her garden. She asked Melville if his queen had made up her mind regarding the man who should be her husband. He replied that she was just now thinking more of some disputes upon the borders, and that she was desirous that her Majesty should send my Lord of Bedford and my Lord Dudley to meet her and her commissioners there. Elizabeth affected to be hurt at Melville naming the Earl of Bedford first. She said that "it appeared to her as if I made but small account of Lord Robert, seeing that I named Bedford before him; but ere it were long she would make him a greater earl, and I should see it done before me, for she esteemed him as one whom she should have married herself, if she had ever been minded to take a husband. But being determined to end her life in virginity, she wished that the queen her sister should marry him, for with him she might find it in her heart to declare Queen Mary second person, rather than any other; for, being matched with him, it would best remove out of her mind all fear and suspicion of usurpation before her death."

Elizabeth immediately carried into effect her word that she would make Dudley an earl, by creating him, whilst Melville was present, Earl of Leicester and Baron Denbigh. "This was done," he says, "with great state at Westminster, herself helping to put on his robes, he sitting on his knees before her, and keeping a great gravity and discreet behaviour; but as for the queen, she could not refrain from putting her hand in his neck to tickle him, smilingly, the French ambassador and I standing beside her. Then she asked me 'how I liked him.' I said, 'as he was a worthy subject, so he was happy in a great prince, who could discern and reward good service.' 'Yet,' she replied, 'ye like better of yon long lad,' pointing towards my Lord Darnley, who, as nearest prince of the blood, that day bare the sword before her. My answer was, 'that no woman of spirit would make choice of sic a man, that was liker a woman than a man, for he was lusty, beardless, and lady-faced.' I had no will that she should think I liked him, though I had a secret charge to deal with his mother, Lady Lennox, to purchase leave for him to pass to Scotland."

At this crisis it may be as well to see who these two noblemen were. We have seen that Dudley, now Earl of Leicester, was the son of the late attainted Duke of Northumberland and brother of the attainted Lord Guildford Dudley. Leicester had won the fancy of Elizabeth by his showy person, for that was his only attractive quality. He was neither brave, nor of superior ability, nor honourable. He had the worst possible character with the public at large for almost every vice, and was confidently believed to be the murderer of his wife, the beautiful Amy Robsart, whose story Sir Walter Scott has told in his "Kenilworth." As Leicester saw a prospect of marrying the queen, he is said, according to a contemporary account, to have sent his wife "to the house of his servant, Foster, of Cumnor, by Oxford, where shortly after she had the chance to fall from a pair of stairs, and so to break her neck, but yet without hurting of her hood that stood upon her head. But Sir Richard Varney, who, by commandment, remained with her that day alone with one man, and had sent away perforce all her servants from her to a market two miles off—he, I say, with his man, can tell you how she died."

The account continues:—"The man, being afterwards taken for a felony in the marches of Wales, and offering the matter of the said murder, was made privily away in the prison; and Sir Richard Varney himself, who died about the same time in London, cried piteously and blasphemed God, and said to a gentleman of worship not long before his death, that all the devils in hell did tear him to pieces. The wife, also, of Baldwin Butler, kinsman to my lord, gave out the whole fact a little before her death." Nor was this the firm belief of the multitude only, but of men of the highest estate and best information in the realm. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the queen's ambassador at Paris, one of her most sagacious statesmen, was so horrified at the idea of the queen's marrying this man, that, as we have seen, when he could not move Cecil to dare this representation, he sent his own secretary, Jones, to make a full statement of the murder of his wife by Leicester. Throckmorton declared that such a marriage would render Englishmen the opprobrium of men and the contempt of all people: "God and religion, which be the fundamentals, shall be out of estimation; the queen our sovereign discredited, contemned, and neglected; our country ruined, undone, and made a prey."

Yet so little effect had this honest representation, and the general abhorrence of Leicester, on Elizabeth, that for three years after it she continued her open and infatuated dalliance with this man, and then made him Earl of Leicester, and proposed him as the husband of the Scottish Queen, the real truth being, that as she never meant to marry at all, so she never meant the Queen of Scots to have him. The fact was that she liked to tease both Leicester and Queen Mary; she often quarrelled with Leicester, and then made it up by valuable presents. "His treasure was vast," says Lloyd, "his gains unaccountable, all passages to preferment being in his hand, at home and abroad. He was never reconciled to her Majesty under £5,000, nor to a subject under £500, and was ever and anon out with both."

Lord Darnley, "the long lad," as Elizabeth called him, was the son of that Earl of Lennox who in the time of Henry VIII. joined with Glencairn, Cassillis, and others in attempting to betray Scotland to Henry. For those services, and especially for attempting to betray Dumbarton Castle to the English, he was banished and suffered forfeiture of his estates, but received from Henry VIII., as the promised reward for his treason, the hand of the Lady Margaret Douglas, daughter of Margaret Queen of Scotland, and sister of Henry VIII., one of the lewdest and most turbulent women of the age. Thus