LEICESTER, ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF, one of Queen Elizabeth's principal favourites, was born about the year 1531, of an ancient and noble family. Edmund Dudley, the rapacions minister of Henry YIL, was his grandfather. His father was John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, who, after attaining considerable celebrity during the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., was executed in August 1553, for his adherence to the claims of Lady Jane Grey, who was his daughter-in-law. Robert Dudley was knighted by Edward VI.; was imprisoned at the name time and for the same offence as his was liberated in 1554 ; and was afterwards appointed master of the ordnance to Queen Mary. Ho had all those exterior qualities which were likely to ingratiate him with a queen : a youthful and handsome person, a polite address, and a courteous insinuating behaviour; and Elizabeth was no sooner on the throne than she bestowed upon him a profusion of grants and titles. He received from her lordships, manors, and castles : he was made master of the horse, a privy-coun cillor, a knight of the garter, high-steward of the University of Cam bridge, baron of Denbigh, and earl of Leicester; to which other dignities were subsequently added. Leicester was continually in attendance at court, and the queen] delighted in his society. At an early age he had married Amy, the daughter of Sir John Robsart. In 15th) this lady died suddenly at Cumnor under auspicious circum stances, murdered, as many supposed, at the instigation of her husband, who, seeing no bounds to the queen's friendship for him, found his wife an obstacle to his ambition : but there really appears no sufficient ground for the suspicion, which however Sir Walter Scott, who in his • Kenilworth' has in the moat extraordinary manner distorted the historical eircumatances, has rendered the common opinion. The queen admired Leicester, trusted him, and allowed him great influence; • she also projected a marriage for him with Mary, Queen of Soots. It is scarcely roe.esstry to say that the union did not take place; and that Leicester, continuing to reside at court, played his part with the queen with consnaunate dexterity. During this residence he engaged in an
intrigue, or, as the lady asserted, a marriage with the widow of Lord who bore him a son, to whom be bequeathed much of his property, and the reversion of some of his estates on the death of his brother, in a will which designated him his 'base' son. Lady Sheffield, in a long and elaborate statement which she drew up when her son Sir Robert Dudley sought in the reign of James IL to establish his legitimacy, declares that she afterwards narrowly escaped death from some poison that was administered to her, and being menaced by the Earl of Leicester, consented to marry Sir Edward "a person of great honour and parts, and sometime ambassador to France," as the only way to protect herself from the vengeance of the earl : and she declares that "she deeply repented afterwards of this marriage, as having thereby done the greatest wrong that could be to herself and her son." The proceedings, we may add here, were suddenly brought to a stop at the suit of Leicester's widow, the Lady Laths], the Star Chamber ordering the papers to be sealed up, and the principal witnesses "to be held suspect." Sir Robert Dudley immediately left the country, and never returned to it. But in the reign of Charles I., the king, who succeeded to Kenilworth as heir to his brother Prince Henry, who had purchased Sir Robert Dudley's title to that estate, bargained with the wife of Sir Robert Dudley (she having separated from her husband who was living at Florence) for the purchase of her jointure on the Kenilworth property, and (as a part apparently of the purchase money) created her Duchess of Dudley, the patent setting forth that the legitimacy of Sir Robert Dudley had boon fully Sir Walter Scott it may be noticed has borrowed much of the testimony of the widow of Lord Sheffield—who claimed to be Leicester's wife—and transferred it to Amy Robsart, whom he never denied, except In the pages of the novel, to be his wife.