Varney hastened to reply, preventing Leicester—­“So please your Majesty, my young Lord of Oxford, who is here in presence, knows Master Anthony Foster’s hand and his character.”

The Earl of Oxford, a young unthrift, whom Foster had more than once accommodated with loans on usurious interest, acknowledged, on this appeal, that he knew him as a wealthy and independent franklin, supposed to be worth much money, and verified the certificate produced to be his handwriting.

“And who speaks to the Doctor’s certificate?” said the Queen.  “Alasco, methinks, is his name.”

Masters, her Majesty’s physician (not the less willingly that he remembered his repulse from Sayes Court, and thought that his present testimony might gratify Leicester, and mortify the Earl of Sussex and his faction), acknowledged he had more than once consulted with Doctor Alasco, and spoke of him as a man of extraordinary learning and hidden acquirements, though not altogether in the regular course of practice.  The Earl of Huntingdon, Lord Leicester’s brother-in-law, and the old Countess of Rutland, next sang his praises, and both remembered the thin, beautiful Italian hand in which he was wont to write his receipts, and which corresponded to the certificate produced as his.

“And now, I trust, Master Tressilian, this matter is ended,” said the Queen.  “We will do something ere the night is older to reconcile old Sir Hugh Robsart to the match.  You have done your duty something more than boldly; but we were no woman had we not compassion for the wounds which true love deals, so we forgive your audacity, and your uncleansed boots withal, which have well-nigh overpowered my Lord of Leicester’s perfumes.”

So spoke Elizabeth, whose nicety of scent was one of the characteristics of her organization, as appeared long afterwards when she expelled Essex from her presence, on a charge against his boots similar to that which she now expressed against those of Tressilian.

But Tressilian had by this time collected himself, astonished as he had at first been by the audacity of the falsehood so feasibly supported, and placed in array against the evidence of his own eyes.  He rushed forward, kneeled down, and caught the Queen by the skirt of her robe.  “As you are Christian woman,” he said, “madam, as you are crowned Queen, to do equal justice among your subjects—­as you hope yourself to have fair hearing (which God grant you) at that last bar at which we must all plead, grant me one small request!  Decide not this matter so hastily.  Give me but twenty-four hours’ interval, and I will, at the end of that brief space, produce evidence which will show to demonstration that these certificates, which state this unhappy lady to be now ill at ease in Oxfordshire, are false as hell!”

“Let go my train, sir!” said Elizabeth, who was startled at his vehemence, though she had too much of the lion in her to fear; “the fellow must be distraught.  That witty knave, my godson Harrington, must have him into his rhymes of Orlando Furioso!  And yet, by this light, there is something strange in the vehemence of his demand.—­Speak, Tressilian, what wilt thou do if, at the end of these four-and-twenty hours, thou canst not confute a fact so solemnly proved as this lady’s illness?”