special request; “and if more of her friends could have been sent,” said he, “I would have sent them;” but with all their minuteness of inquiry, “they could find,” wrote Blount, “no presumptions of evil,” although he expressed a suspicion that “some of the jurymen were sorry that they could not.”  That the unfortunate lady was killed by a fall down stairs was all that could be made of it by a coroner’s inquest, rather hostile than otherwise, and urged to rigorous investigation by the supposed culprit himself.  Nevertheless, the calumny has endured for three centuries, and is likely to survive as many more.

Whatever crimes Dudley may have committed in the course of his career, there is no doubt whatever that he was the most abused man in Europe.  He had been deeply wounded by the Jesuit’s artful publication, in which all the misdeeds with which he was falsely or justly charged were drawn up in awful array, in a form half colloquial, half judicial.  “You had better give some contentment to my Lord Leicester,” wrote the French envoy from London to his government, “on account of the bitter feelings excited in him by these villainous books lately written against him.”

The Earl himself ascribed these calumnies to the Jesuits, to the Guise faction, and particularly to—­the Queen of Scots.  He was said, in consequence, to have vowed an eternal hatred to that most unfortunate and most intriguing Princess.  “Leicester has lately told a friend,” wrote Charles Paget, “that he will persecute you to the uttermost, for that he supposeth your Majesty to be privy to the setting forth of the book against him.”  Nevertheless, calumniated or innocent he was at least triumphant over calumny.  Nothing could shake his hold upon Elizabeth’s affections.  The Queen scorned but resented the malignant attacks upon the reputation of her favourite.  She declared “before God and in her conscience, that she knew the libels against him to be most scandalous, and such as none but an incarnate devil himself could dream to be true.”  His power, founded not upon genius nor virtue, but upon woman’s caprice, shone serenely above the gulf where there had been so many shipwrecks.  “I am now passing into another world,” said Sussex, upon his death-bed, to his friends, “and I must leave you to your fortunes; but beware of the gipsy, or he will be too hard for you.  You know not the beast so well as I do.”

The “gipsy,” as he had been called from his dark complexion, had been renowned in youth for the beauty of his person, being “tall and singularly well-featured, of a sweet aspect, but high foreheaded, which was of no discommendation,” according to Naunton.  The Queen, who had the passion of her father for tall and proper men, was easier won by externals, from her youth even to the days of her dotage, than befitted so very sagacious a personage.  Chamberlains, squires of the body, carvers, cup-bearers, gentlemen-ushers, porters, could obtain neither place