Page:The house of Cecil.djvu/76

 56 THE CECILS

suspicions concerning this visit in the Queen's ear, and with some success, for on his return he writes to the Earl of Shrewsbury :

" I had very sharp reproofs for my going to Buxton, with plain charging of me for favouring the Queen of Scots ; and that in so earnest a sort as I never looked for, knowing my integrity to her Majesty, but specially knowing how contrariously the Queen of Scots conceived of me for many things passed to the offence of the Queen of Scots."

Burghley even thought it prudent to decline a proposed match between his daughter Elizabeth, then nine years of age, and a son of the Earl of Shrewsbury, who, as guardian of Mary, was supposed to have been privy to what was going on. 1

The Lord Treasurer paid several other visits to Buxton where, if we may judge from a letter written by the Earl of Leicester in the summer of 1577, he did not always submit himself to the discipline necessary for a cure. Leicester and his brother thought the water would be good for him, " but not if he does as they hear he did last time, take great journeys abroad, 10 or 12 miles a day, and use liberal diet, with dinners and suppers.

1 In this year also another offer was made for the hand of Elizabeth Cecil by the Earl of Essex, on behalf of his eldest son (then aged six). Essex died in 1576, and the day before his death he wrote a pathetic letter, asking that his son might be brought up in Burghley's household, so that he might grow up " to reverence your Lordship for your wisdom and gravity and lay up your commands and advices in the treasury of his heart." " It is sad to consider," says Hume, " that the son grew up to be the enemy of his father's friend : to succeed, in his enmity, the vile Leicester, who dishonoured his mother and deliberately ruined his father,"

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