Robert, it is said, found many of these hours of duress far from unpleasant; for among the prisoners in the Tower was none other than the Princess Elizabeth, sister to the Queen (and her successor on the throne); and we are told, on what authority does not appear, that there were many sweet and stolen meetings between the fair young Princess and the captive knight, when bribed warders turned a blind eye on their dallying.  And rumour even goes so far as to speak of secret nuptials, the fruits of which were, in late years, to bear such high names as my Lord of Essex and Francis Bacon.

“Fairy tales,” no doubt; but, stripped of such ornamental embellishment, there can be little doubt that it was within the Tower’s grim walls that Dudley first learnt to love the lady who was to be his Queen, and in whose life he was destined to play such a romantic part, when she should wear her crown, and he should be her avowed lover and aspirant to her hand.

A year of such pleasantly-qualified captivity, and Robert Dudley was a free man again, sent to purge his treason, by a Queen, indulgent to his youth and it may be to his good looks, by wielding a sword in the war then raging between Spain and France; and here he acquitted himself so valiantly for Mary’s Spanish allies that, on his return in 1558, covered with glory, the ban on the Dudleys was removed; and Robert and his brothers and sisters were restored to all the rank and rights their father’s treason had forfeited.

A few months later Queen Mary died; and when Elizabeth ascended the throne, Dudley’s sun burst into splendour.  The romance which had been cradled amidst the fearful joys of prison-meetings, was now to flourish under vastly-changed conditions.  That the new Queen had lost her heart to the handsome and accomplished cavalier, whose prowess in war had set the seal on the favour won by his graces of person and mind and his ingratiating charm, there can be small doubt; and as little that Dudley, forgetful of the wife left to pine in solitude in her Norfolk home, returned the devotion of the lady, now his Sovereign, who had made his Tower prison a palace of delight.

Nor did Elizabeth make any concealment of her passion.  She was a Queen; and none should question her right to smile on any man, be he subject or king.  Before she had been a year on the Throne, Dudley was proudly wearing the coveted Garter; was a Privy Councillor and Master of Her Majesty’s horse.  She gave him fat lands and monasteries to add to the large possessions with which her brother Edward had endowed his favourite; and wherever she went on her Royal progresses, Robert Dudley rode gallantly at her right hand, a King in all but name.  And no Queen ever had more splendid escort.

He was, indeed, a man after her own heart, the beau ideal of a cavalier; a lover, like herself, of pomp and splendour, a past-master of the arts of pageantry and pleasure, and the owner of a tongue as skilled in the language of adroit flattery as in the use of honeyed words.  Such was Robert Dudley who loved his Queen; and such the Queen who returned undisguised admiration for flattery, and love for love.