Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 09.djvu/409

 plicated with Markham, Watson, and Sir Walter Raleigh in the ‘Bye plot.’ By this lady he had two children: Frances, a daughter, who on 25 June 1610 married Henry Clifford, only son of the fourth earl of Cumberland, and William, his successor as second earl of Salisbury, who, on 1 Dec. 1608, married Lady Catherine Howard, youngest daughter of Thomas, earl Suffolk, and sister of the infamous Countess of Essex. The earl seems never to have had the satisfaction of seeing any male issue from either of these alliances. Of Lady Clifford's children only one daughter attained a marriageable age; his successor's eldest son was not born till 1616. Of that successor Clarendon has left perhaps his most caustic ‘character.’ Lord Salisbury's constitution had begun to show signs of breaking up for a year or two before his death. As early as the spring of 1611 he was reported to be dying. In the summer Sir Theodore Mayerne regarded his case as hopeless, but he continued through the winter transacting business, and in January there was some amendment.

In April 1612 he set out for Bath, where the waters, it was said, were likely to restore him. On 8 May he wrote his last letter to his son, whom he had expressly ordered not to come to him; but the young man would not heed the injunction, and on the 19th was at his father's side. Feeling that all hope of a cure was gone, and anxious to reach home before the end should come, he left Bath on the 21st. The journey told upon his exhausted frame, and he only succeeded in reaching Marlborough, where he was received into the parsonage house, and there breathed his last on 24 May 1612. He died owing nearly 38,000l., at that time an enormous sum, which it required the sale of an extensive territory to clear off. Two curious stories which have reached us regarding Lord Salisbury deserve to be noticed. The first is to be found in Lodge's ‘Illustrations of English History’ (iii. 146), and has been more than once quoted or referred to as showing that Cecil was a ‘man of gallantry.’ It appears that he had given a picture of himself to Elizabeth, lady Derby, apparently as a wedding present; that the picture ‘was on a dainty tablet, and the queen espying it … snatched it away, … fastened it to her shoe, and walked long with it there.’ Hereupon Cecil got one of the court poets to write some verses upon the incident, and some one else to set them to music. Writers who are prone to draw hasty inferences from scraps of information, and readers who are always ready to accept the worst rather than the simplest interpretation of a stray anecdote, require to be warned that Elizabeth, lady Derby, was Cecil's niece, his own sister's child! The other story is told by Dr. Donne in one of his letters, but nothing like an allusion to the circumstances is to be met with in any contemporary writer. The internal evidence which Donne's letter affords fixes the date to about 1 Aug. 1609. According to this letter, in consequence of a violent quarrel between Salisbury and Lord Hertford, Salisbury sent the other ‘a direct challenge by his servant, Mr. Knightley. … All circumstances were so clearly handled between them, that St. James was agreed for the place, and they were both come from their several lodgings and upon the way to have met, when they were interrupted by such as from the king were sent to have care of it.’ Fifty years before this time Salisbury's elder brother, the future Earl of Exeter, had been ordered to leave Paris to remove him from the contaminating influence of this same Lord Hertford, then a young man of dissolute life and expensive habits. He was now considerably over seventy. Salisbury himself was thirty years his junior, and had been made lord treasurer the year before. Donne, in telling the story, regards it as so improbable that his correspondent would hardly be brought to believe it; but that it can have been a mere invention, or that an event so extraordinary should have been hushed up and never found its way into the news-letters of the time, seems equally inexplicable. Possibly when the Hatfield MSS. which are concerned with this period shall have been calendared, some light may be thrown upon the curious episode. [The main sources for the biography of Lord Salisbury are to be found in the documents summarised in the Calendars of State Papers (Domestic) covering the period between 1581 and 1618. Next in importance come Winwood's Memorials of State (3 vols. fol. 1725) and the Court and Times of James I, printed in 1848 from the manuscripts which Dr. Birch left behind him. Bishop Goodman's Court and Times of James I was published by Professor Brewer in 2 vols. 8vo, 1839. It contains some valuable letters printed nowhere else. The bishop's ‘character’ of Salisbury must be taken for what it is worth. The best sketch of Lord Salisbury is to be found in Brewer's English Studies; the writer had the great advantage of having the Hatfield papers for years under his supervision. Nichols's Progresses of Elizabeth and James I are full of curious information, but the index to these seven quarto volumes is altogether insufficient. The minute account by Mr. John Bowles, afterwards bishop of Rochester, of Salisbury's last sickness and death is to be found in Peck's Desiderata Curiosa, i. 205. For all that concerns Cecil's relations with Sir Anthony Bacon, Birch's Memoirs