For a few too brief years Countess Sarah was happy in her new and splendid environment, though it is said she often sighed for the dear dead days when her husband was a landscape painter, and she his humble bride in their village home.  The modest primrose did not bear well the transplanting to the lordly hot-house.  Her cheeks began to lose their roses.  She bore to her husband three children; and then, “like a lily drooping, she bowed down her head and died,” tenderly and lovingly nursed to the last breath by the husband whose heart, it is said, died with her.

Of her two sons, the elder succeeded to his father’s Earldom, and was promoted to a Marquisate.  The younger, Lord Thomas Cecil, married a daughter of the fourth Duke of Richmond—­thus mingling the peasant blood of Hoggins with the Royal strain of the “Merrie Monarch,”—­and survived until the year 1873.  Her daughter had for husband the Right Honourable Henry Manvers Pierrepoint, and became grandmother to the present Duke of Wellington, who thus has for great-grandmother Sarah Hoggins, the rustic beauty who milked cows and was wooed in the Shropshire orchard by “Mr Jones, the highwayman,” when George the Third was King.

CHAPTER XXI

THE FAVOURITE OF A QUEEN

When Robert Dudley was cradled in the year 1532 the ball of Fortune was already at his feet, awaiting the necessary vigour and enterprise to kick it.  He had, it is true, no great lineage to boast of.  Cecil spoke contemptuously of him in later and envious years as grandson of a mere squire and son of a knight; but the so-called squire was none other than Edmond Dudley, the shrewd financier and crafty-tongued minion of Henry VII., who, with Empson for ally, filled his sovereign’s purse with ill-gotten gold, and paid for his enterprise with his head when the eighth Henry set himself to the paying off of old scores.  His father, the knight, was that John Dudley, King Henry’s trusted friend and executor of his will, Admiral and Earl Marshal of England, whose splendid gifts and boundless ambition won a dukedom for him, and made him for a time more powerful than his King.

[Illustration:  ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER]

Such was the parentage of Robert Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland’s fifth son, who inherited, with his grandfather’s scheming brain and plausible tongue, the ambition and love of splendour which made his father the most brilliant subject of two kings.  And this great, if dangerous heritage was not long in manifesting itself in the young lordling, who was destined to add to his family’s story a chapter more romantic and dazzling than that of which his father was the hero.

As a boy in the schoolroom he was quick to show gifts of mind almost phenomenal in one so young.  Latin and Italian, mathematics and abstruse sciences came as easily to this scion of the Dudleys as reading and arithmetic to less-dowered boys.  And with this precocity of mind he developed physical graces and skill no less remarkable until, by the time he was well in his ’teens, few grown men could ride a horse, couch a lance, or speed an arrow with such skill as he.