No wonder it was commonly rumoured either that she was actually Dudley’s wife or that her relations with him were open to grave suspicion.  “I am spoken of,” she once bitterly said to the Spanish Ambassador, “as if I were an immodest woman.  I ought not to wonder at it.  I have favoured him because of his excellent disposition and his many merits.  But I am young, and he is young, and therefore we have been slandered.  God knows, they do us grievous wrong, and the time will come when the world knows it also.  I do not live in a corner; a thousand eyes see all I do, and calumny will not fasten on me for ever.”

But neither Elizabeth nor Dudley (or Leicester, as we must now call him) allowed these rumours and suspicions to affect even their familiarities, which were proclaimed to all on many a public occasion; as when the Earl once, during a heated game of tennis, snatched the Queen’s handkerchief from her hand and proceeded to wipe his perspiring forehead with it.

To Elizabeth’s passion for pomp and pageantry Leicester was indispensable.  It was he who arranged to the smallest detail her gorgeous progresses and receptions, culminating in that historic visit to Kenilworth in 1575, every hour of which was crowded with cunningly-devised entertainments—­from the splendid pageantry of her welcome, through banquets and masquerades, to hunting and bear-baiting—­all on a scale of lavish prodigality such as even that most gorgeous of Queens had never known.

Thus for thirty long years Leicester held his paramount place in the affections of his Sovereign—­a pre-eminence which was never seriously endangered even when he seemed most disloyal, and transferred to other women attentions of which she claimed a monopoly.  When he flirted outrageously with my Lady Hereford, one of the loveliest women at Court, she responded by coquetting openly with Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Ormonde, or Sir Thomas Heneage; and only laughed at the jealousy she aroused.  “If a man may flirt,” she would mockingly say, “why not a woman, especially when that woman is a Queen?” And, of course, to this question there was no other answer for my lord than to “kiss and be friends,” and to promise to be more discreet in the future.

But the Earl was ever weak in the presence of beauty; and in spite of all his vows could not long be true even to his Queen.  He lost his heart to the lovely wife of Lord Sheffield; and when her husband died conveniently and mysteriously (it was said that Leicester, with his doctor’s help, removed him by a dose of poison) it was not long before he wedded her in secret, only just in time to make her child, whose name, “Robert Dudley,” made no concealment of his parentage, legitimate.  Before the child was many months old, however, the father was caught in the toils of another charmer, my Lady Essex, and after deserting his wife and, it is said, unsuccessfully trying to poison her, he made Lady Essex his Countess, in defiance of that secret wedding with Sheffield’s widow.