Page:The house of Cecil.djvu/77

 WILLIAM, LORD BURGHLEY 57

They take another way, dining two or three together now Lord Pembroke is there, having but one dish or two at most and taking the air afoot or on horseback, moderately." Whether Burghley followed this advice we cannot say, but he went to Buxton in July and at Leicester's request sent the Queen a " tun of Buxton water." Elizabeth's reception of it was characteristic. ' Your water is safely arrived," wrote the Earl, " and I told her Majesty of it, who now it is come, seemeth not to make any great account of it. And yet she more than twice or thrice commanded me earnestly to write to you for it, and after I had done so asked me sundry times whether I had remembered it or no, but it seems her Majesty doth mistrust it will not be of the goodness here it is there ; beside, somebody told her there was some bruit of it about, as though her Majesty had had some sore leg. Such like devices made her half angry with me now for sending to you for it."

At this time Burghley's anxieties were aggra- vated by the behaviour of his son-in-law, the Earl of Oxford. Ann Cecil had been betrothed in 1569, at the age of thirteen, to Sir Philip Sidney, and the settlements for the proposed marriage are preserved at Hat field. The arrangement, how- ever, fell through, and in 1571 she was married with much pomp to Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, who had been brought up as a Royal ward in Burghley's household. " Th' Erie of Oxenforde hath gotten him a wyffe," wrote Lord St. John, " or at the leste a wyffe hath caught him. This is

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