Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was then fifty-four years of age.  There are few personages in English history whose adventures, real or fictitious, have been made more familiar to the world than his have been, or whose individuality has been presented in more picturesque fashion, by chronicle, tragedy, or romance.  Born in the same day of the month and hour of the day with the Queen, but two years before her birth, the supposed synastry of their destinies might partly account, in that age of astrological superstition, for the influence which he perpetually exerted.  They had, moreover, been fellow-prisoners together, in the commencement of the reign of Mary, and it is possible that he may have been the medium through which the indulgent expressions of Philip ii. were conveyed to the Princess Elizabeth.

His grandfather, John Dudley, that “caterpillar of the commonwealth,” who lost his head in the first year of Henry VIII. as a reward for the grist which he brought to the mill of Henry VII.; his father, the mighty Duke of Northumberland, who rose out of the wreck of an obscure and ruined family to almost regal power, only to perish, like his predecessor, upon the scaffold, had bequeathed him nothing save rapacity, ambition, and the genius to succeed.  But Elizabeth seemed to ascend the throne only to bestow gifts upon her favourite.  Baronies and earldoms, stars and garters, manors and monopolies, castles and forests, church livings and college chancellorships, advowsons and sinecures, emoluments and dignities, the most copious and the most exalted, were conferred upon him in breathless succession.  Wine, oil, currants, velvets, ecclesiastical benefices, university headships, licences to preach, to teach, to ride, to sail, to pick and to steal, all brought “grist to his mill.”  His grandfather, “the horse leach and shearer,” never filled his coffers more rapidly than did Lord Robert, the fortunate courtier.  Of his early wedlock with the ill-starred Amy Robsart, of his nuptial projects with the Queen, of his subsequent marriages and mock-marriages with Douglas Sheffield and Lettice of Essex, of his plottings, poisonings, imaginary or otherwise, of his countless intrigues, amatory and political—­of that luxuriant, creeping, flaunting, all-pervading existence which struck its fibres into the mould, and coiled itself through the whole fabric, of Elizabeth’s life and reign—­of all this the world has long known too much to render a repetition needful here.  The inmost nature and the secret deeds of a man placed so high by wealth and station, can be seen but darkly through the glass of contemporary record.  There was no tribunal to sit upon his guilt.  A grandee could be judged only when no longer a favourite, and the infatuation of Elizabeth for Leicester terminated only with his life.  He stood now upon the soil of the Netherlands in the character of a “Messiah,” yet he has been charged with crimes sufficient to send twenty humbler malefactors to the gibbet.  “I think,” said a most malignant arraigner of the man, in a published pamphlet, “that the Earl of Leicester hath more blood lying upon his head at this day, crying for vengeance, than ever had private man before, were he never so wicked.”