Was it suicide or a brutal murder?  The bucolic jury shrank from either conclusion, and gave as their verdict “accidental death.”  That Amy Robsart ended her own life is far from improbable; for it was no secret to her friends that she was weary of it, and would welcome the release death alone could bring.  But the general opinion, so far from supporting this plausible theory, turned to thoughts of murder, and branded Dudley as slayer of his wife.  It was even commonly whispered that he had bribed one of his minions, Anthony Foster, to hurl her down the stairs to her death.

Whatever may be the truth, none could prove it then; and who shall succeed now?  It is more generous and certainly more probable to suppose that Amy Robsart by her own act—­wilful, at the dictate of a brain disordered by grief, or accidental—­removed the barrier to her husband’s passion for his Queen.  Certain it is that Dudley affected, if he did not actually feel, deep sorrow at his wife’s death, and that he spared no pains to solve the mystery that surrounded it.

His grief, however, seems to have been short-lived; for before the unhappy Amy had been many months in her grave we find him more ardent than ever in his devotion to Elizabeth, whose hand he was now free to claim.  But the Queen, who was nothing if not an arrant coquette, was in no mood to be caught even by the man she loved.  She drove him to distraction by her caprices.  One moment she would “rap him on the knuckles,” only to smile her sweetest on him the next.  One day she would flaunt in his face a patent of peerage, as evidence of her affection; the next she would cut the parchment to pieces under his nose, laughing the while.  She roused him to frenzies of jealousy by dallying with one Royal offer of marriage after another—­now it was Philip, the Spanish King, now His Majesty of Sweden—­canvassing their respective merits and charms in his presence, and flaring into angry retorts when he ventured to ridicule his august rivals.

She carried her tortures even to the extent of seeming to encourage a match between her favourite and Mary Queen of Scots; and, to make him a worthy suitor for a Royal hand, granted him the peerage she had so long dangled before him.  Robert Dudley as Baron Denbigh and Earl of Leicester was no unfit husband for her “Royal sister”; certainly a much more possible personage than “Sir Robert” could have been.  But she never intended thus to lose her most acceptable admirer, and was relieved—­though she affected to be angry—­when news came that Mary had chosen Darnley for her husband.  Thus was Leicester’s loss Elizabeth’s gain; and his reward was that he took still a higher place in her favour.

If he was not now King Consort in name, he was, at least, in place and power.  When the Queen fancied she was dying of small-pox she announced her wish that he should be appointed Protector of the Realm at a princely salary; and, when she recovered, he was empowered to act as her deputy—­to receive ambassadors, to interview ministers, and to sit in her seat at the deliberations of her council.  To such an eminence had the favour of a Queen raised the grandson of the “country squire.”