Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/446

 426 L E I L E I university of Oxford made him their chancellor, and Charles IX. of France sent him the order of St Michael. A few years later he formed an ambiguous connexion with the baroness dowager of Sheffield, which was maintained by the lady, with great appearance of truth, to have been a valid marriage, though it was concealed from the queen. Long afterwards, in the days of James L, their son, Sir Robert Dudley, a man of extraordinary talents, sought to establish his legitimacy ; but his suit was suddenly brought to a stop, and the documents connected with it sealed up by an order of the Star Chamber, without any reasons being assigned. In 1575 Queen Elizabeth visited the earl at Kenilworth, where she was entertained for some days with great magnificence. The picturesque account of the event given by Sir Walter Scott has made every one familiar with the general character of the scene. Next year Walter, earl of Essex, with whom Leicester had had some differences, died in Ireland, not without suspicion of poison, and Leicester s subsequent marriage with his widow again gave rise to very serious imputations against him. This marriage, like the former, was kept secret at first ; but it was revealed to the queen in 1579 by Simier, an emissary of the duke of Alengon, to whose projected match with Elizabeth the earl seemed to be the principal obstacle. The queen showed great displeasure at the news, and had some thought, it is said, of committing Leicester to the Tower, but was dissuaded from doing so by his rival the earl of Sussex. In February 1582 Leicester, along with a number of other noblemen and gentlemen, escorted the duke of Alengon on his return to Antwerp to be invested with the government of the Low Countries. In 1584 he inaugurated an association for the protection of Queen Elizabeth against conspirators. About this time there issued from the press the famous pamphlet, believed to have been the work of Parsons the Jesuit, entitled Leicester s Commonwealth, which was intended to suggest to the people that the English constitution was subverted and the government handed over to one who was at heart an atheist and a traitor, besides being a man of infamous life and morals. The book was ordered to be suppressed by letters from the privy council, in which it was declared that the charges against the earl were to the queen s certain knowledge untrue ; nevertheless they produced a very strong impression, and were believed in by some who had no sympathy with Jesuits long after Leicester s death. In 1585 he was appointed commander of an expedition to the Low Countries in aid of the revolted provinces, and sailed with a fleet of fifty ships to Flushing, where he was received with great enthusiasm. In January following he was invested with the government of the provinces, but immediately received a strong reprimand from the queen for taking upon himself a function which she had not authorized. Both he and the States General were obliged to apologize; but the latter protested that they had no intention of giving him absolute control of their affairs, and that it would be extremely dangerous to them to revoke the appointment. Leicester accordingly was allowed to retain his dignity ; but the incident was inauspicious, nor did affairs prosper greatly under his management. His nephew Sir Philip Sidney was slain at the unsuccessful siege of Zutphen, and complaints were made by the States General of the conduct of the whole campaign. He returned to England for a time, and went back in 1587, when he made an abortive effort to raise the siege of Sluys. Disagreements increasing between him and the States, he was recalled by the queen, from whom, contrary to the expectation of his enemies, he met with a very good reception ; and he continued in such favour that in the following summer (the year being that of the Armada, 1588) he was appointed lieutenant-general of the army mustered at Tilbury to resist Spanish invasion. After the crisis was past he was returning homewards from the court to Kenilworth, when he was attacked by a sudden illness and died at his house at Cornbury in Oxfordshire, on the 4th September. Such are the bare facts of Leicester s life. Of his character it is more difficult to speak with confidence, but some features of it are indisputable. Being in person tall and remarkably handsome, he improved these advantages by a very ingratiating manner. A man of no small ability and still more ambition, he was nevertheless vain, and presumed at times upon his influence with the queen to a degree that brought upon him a sharp rebuff. On the other hand, Elizabeth stood by him, as we have seen, against efforts to supplant him. That she was ever really in love with him, as modern writers have supposed, is extremely questionable ; but she saw in him some valuable qualities which marked him as the fitting recipient of high favours. He was a man of princely tastes, especially in architecture. At court he became latterly the leader of the Puritan party, and his letters were pervaded by expressions of religious feeling which it is hard to believe were insincere. Of the darker suspicions against him it is enough to say that much was certainly reported beyond the truth ; but there remain some facts sufficiently mysterious to make a just estimate of the man a rather perplexing problem. (j. GA.) LEIGH, a market and manufacturing town of Lanca shire, England, is situated on several branch railway lines, 7| miles south-west of Bolton. The ancient parish church was, with the exception of the old tower, rebuilt in 1873 in the Perpendicular style, at a cost of over 10,000. The grammar school, the date of whose foundation is unknown, received its principal endowments in 1C55, 1662, and 1681. A union workhouse was erected in 1851 at a cost of 10,000. The staple manufactures of the town are silk and cotton, but there are also glass-works, foundries, breweries, and flour-mills, with extensive collieries. The local government board was formed in 1875 by the amalgamation of those previously existing for the town ships of West Leigh, Bedford, and Pennington. The population of the district was 17,623 in 1871, and 21,733 in 1881. The town includes also a portion of the town ship of Atherton. LEIGH, EDWARD (1602-1671), Puritan linguist and theologian, was born in 1602 at Shawell, Leicestershire, was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, from 1616, and subsequently became a member of the Middle Temple. In 1636 he entered parliament as member for Stafford, and during the civil war he held a colonelcy in the parliamen tary army. He has sometimes been confounded with John Ley, and so represented as having sat in the Westminster Assembly. The public career of Leigh terminated with his expulsion from parliament along with the rest of the Presbyterian party in 1648. From an early period in his life he devoted much of his time to the study of theology and to the preparation for the press of numerous compila tions, the most important of these being the Critica Sacra, containing observations on all the Radices of the Ilebreiv Words of the Old and the Greek of the Neiv Testament (1639-44; new ed., with supplement, 1662), for which the author received the thanks of the Westminster Assembly, to whom it was dedicated. It has frequently been reprinted abroad, and, in the opinion of Leigh s contemporary Fuller, it, &quot; with many other worthy works, will make his judicious industry known to posterity.&quot; It is now, however, but little used. Leigh died in Staffordshire in June 1671. His remaining works included Treatise of Divinity (1646-51), A Body of Divinity (1654), Annotations upon llic New Testament