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PROPOSES TO ELIZABETH HATTON.

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haughty bearing to the Queen, this craving for command IV. 9. in camps, may prove to him the two wings of Icaruswings joined on with wax; wings which may melt as he soars to the sun.

10. Essex cools to a man whose talk is so very much wiser than he wants to hear. They have no scene, no quarrel, no parting; for there are no sympathies to wrench, no friendships to dissolve. Essex ceases to seek advice at Gray's Inn. They now rarely see each other. Bacon is writing his Essays, fagging at the bar, slipping into love; and Essex is still happy to serve him, when he can do it at anybody's cost but his own.

Francis falls into love. Lord Campbell thinks he only falls into debt. "He was desperately poor; he therefore made a bold attempt to restore his position by matrimony." This is surely in Bantam's vein. "When one doesn't know," asks the cockfighter, "is not it natural to think the worst ?" The lady that Bacon courts is rich and of his kin. Elizabeth Hatton, a granddaughter of his uncle Burghley, niece of his cousin Cecil, has been left a widow, young, lovely, powerful in her friends and in her fine estate. The mistress of Hatton House, of Corffe Castle, of Purbeck Isle, a woman whose lovely hand is celebrated in Jonson's verse

"Mistress of a finer table

Hath not history or fable,”

has, of course, crowds of adorers at her feet: among them men no less renowned than William Earl of Pembroke and Francis Bacon. The lady, or her kinsman for her, puts aside their suits. Cecil looks on his fair niece as a thing

10. Essex to Sir Thomas Cecil, June 24, 1597; Bankes's Story of Corffe Castle, 34.

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IV. 10. to be sold for his own gain. Her youth, her beauty, her great inheritance are precious in his sight, and the husband for such a woman must be to him a strong defender or a useful slave.

1597. June.

Oct. 22.

Essex, on the point of sailing for the Azores, writes to Sir Thomas and Lady Cecil, saying, if he had a sister to give away in marriage, he would gladly give her to his friend. If this means more than the cheap generosity of words, it is most fortunate for Francis Bacon that Penelope and Dorothy, the Earl's two sisters, are already in holy bonds. It would be bad enough for him to have won Lady Hatton; it would be awful to have to stand in the shoes of Northumberland or Rich.

11. During the Earl's absence at the Azores Effingham is made an earl: an affront to Essex more galling than the rejection, on his suit, of the services of Bacon and Bodley; for this creation robs him, as he thinks, of the glory of Cadiz fight, and permits a man whom he loathes to walk before him in the Queen's train and sit above him in the House of Peers. When he hears of this grant having passed the Seal, he quits his command without leave, hurries up to town, and, finding the thing done, insults the Queen, spurs to Wanstead House, defying at once the entreaties of the Council to return, and the advice of his best friends to submit. A dark and ruinous spirit now stands by his side. Raleigh screens him from blame in his great failure at the Azores; pleading for him with the Queen in almost passionate terms; but Raleigh is the lion in the way of Blount, his new and most confidential friend. Under the lead of Sir Christopher Blount, Essex begins to

11. Patent of the Earldom of Nottingham, Oct. 22, 1597, S. P. O.; Elizabeth to Essex, Oct. 28, 1597, S. P. O.; Raleigh to Cecil, July 20, 1597, S. P. O.; Cecil to Essex, July 26, 1597, S. P. O.; Devereux, i. 467.

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THE COUNTESS OF LEICESTER.

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1597.

Oct.

part from his old Protestant and patriotic allies, from Bacon IV. 11. and Raleigh, from Cecil and Grey, turning his eyes and ears to the blandishments of loose women and the suggestions of discontented men; to such wantons as Elizabeth Southwell and Mary Howard, to such plotters as Robert Catesby and Christopher Wright. A craze is in his blood and in his brain. "It comes from his mother," sighs the hurt and angry Queen.

12. As Lettice Knollys, as Countess of Essex, as Countess of Leicester, as wife of Sir Christopher Blount, this mother of the Earl has been a barb in Elizabeth's side for thirty years. Married as a girl to a noble husband, she gave up his honour to a seducer, and there is reason to fear she yielded her consent to the taking of his life. While Devereux lived, she deceived the Queen by a scandalous amour, and after his death by a clandestine marriage, with the Earl of Leicester. While Dudley lived, she wallowed in licentious love with Christopher Blount, his groom of the horse. When her second husband expired in agonies at Cornbury, not a gallop from the place in which Amy Robsart died, she again mortified the Queen by a secret union with her seducer Blount.

Her children riot in the same vices. Essex himself, with his ring of favourites, is not more profligate than his sister Lady Rich. In early youth Penelope Rich was the mistress of Sydney, whose stolen love for her is pictured in his most voluptuous verse. Sydney is Astrophel, Penelope Stella. Since Sydney's death she has lived in shameless adultery with Lord Montjoy, though her hus

12. Papers of Mary Queen of Scots, xvi. 7, 15, 16, 17: Camden's Ann. Eliz., 632; Craik's Romance of the Peerage, i. 5, 338.

IV. 12. band Lord Rich is still alive. Her sister Dorothy, after wedding one husband secretly and against the canon, has now married Percy, the wizard Earl of Northumberland, whom she leads the life of a dog.

1597. Oct.

Save in the Suffolk branch of the Howards, it would not be easy to find out of Italian story a group of women so detestable as the mother and sisters of the Earl.

13. The third husband of Lady Leicester is her match in licentiousness, more than her match in crime. By birth a papist, by profession a bravo and a spy, Blount is incapable either of feeling for his wretched wife the manly love of Essex, or of treating her with the lordly courtesy of Leicester. Brutal and rapacious, he has married her, not for her bright eyes, now dim with rheum and vice, but for her jewels, her connexions, and her lands. He cringed to Leicester, that he might sell the secrets of his cabinet and enjoy the pleasures of his bed. With the same blank conscience, he wrings from the widow her ornaments and goods. Chain, armlet, necklace, money, land, timber, everything that is hers, wastes from his prodigal palm. He beats her servants; he thrusts his kinsfolk upon her; he snatches the pearl from her neck, the bond from her strong box. A villain so black would have driven a novelist or playwright mad. Iago, Overreach, Barabas-all the vile creatures of poetic imagination, are to him angels of light. What would have been any other man's worst vice, is Blount's sole virtue-a ruthless and unreasoning constancy to his creed. Fear and shame are to him the idlest of idle words; and, just as he would follow the commands of his general, he obeys the dictation of his priest. As a libertine and as a spy, his

13. Craik's Rom, Peerage, i. 127, 208.

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1597.

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days have been spent in dodging the assassin or in cheat- IV. 13. ing the rope. Waite was sent by Leicester to kill the villain who defiled his bed; Blount repaid the courtesy by prompting or conniving at Leicester's death. Taught by Cardinal Allen, deep in the Jesuit plots, he has more than once put his neck so near the block, that a world which neither loves nor understands him hugs itself in a belief that he must have bought his safety from arrest and condemnation by selling to Walsingham or Cecil the blood of better and braver men.

14. This bravo has subdued the imperious Countess of Leicester to his will. She has been to him an easy, if not an ignoble prey; for the profligate woman dotes on her tyrant; so that she who could barely stoop to the kiss of Devereux and Dudley, prides herself on the blessing of being robbed and cuffed by a wretch without grace, accomplishments, or parts. When, for his private gain and the promotion of his faith, it serves Blount's turn to win over Essex the same brutal ascendency which he has established over Lady Leicester, he feels no pang of heart in turning her tenderness as a mother into the abominable instrument of his guile. His bold, coarse arts are soon successful with the giddy youth; who draws closer and closer to his mother's husband, puts him into places of trust near his person, listens to his counsels, makes associates of his male and female friends, gets him a command in the army, and gives him a seat in the House of Commons.

14. Devereux, i. 281; Council Reg., Mar. 16, 1600. The frequent recurrence of the Privy Council Register in these notes reminds me that I ought to express, and in the warmest manner, my many obligations to Henry Reeve, Esq., of the Privy Council Office. I owe to his ready and unvarying kindness an easy access to the sources of some of the most important facts in this volume.

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