Part 19 (1/2)

To Elizabeth's pa.s.sion 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 Ess.e.x, and after deserting his wife and, it is said, unsuccessfully trying to poison her, he made Lady Ess.e.x his Countess, in defiance of that secret wedding with Sheffield's widow.

When news of this double treachery, with the ugly suspicions that attended it, reached the Queen's ears, her rage knew no bounds. She vowed that she would send her faithless lover to the Tower, that his head should pay forfeit for his false heart; and it was only when her anger had had time to cool that more moderate counsels prevailed, and she was content to banish him to a virtual prison at Greenwich.

It was not long, however, before her heart, always weak where her ”sweet Robin” was concerned, relented; and he was summoned back to Court to resume his place at her side. In fact his very falseness and his follies seemed to make him even dearer to the infatuated woman than his loyalty and his love-making had ever done.

These days of silken ease were, however, soon to be changed. When, in 1585, Elizabeth wished to send her soldiers to help Holland in the struggle with Spain, her choice fell on Leicester to take command of the expedition, though his only experience of war had been more than a quarter of a century earlier, when young Dudley had left the Tower and his fellow Princess-captive's side to give his sword its baptism of blood in Picardy. At Flus.h.i.+ng and Leyden, Utrecht and Rotterdam, the great English Earl and friend of England's Queen was received with the rapturous homage due to a Sovereign deliverer rather than to a subject.

All Holland abandoned herself to a delirium of joy and festivity, and before he had been many weeks in the Netherlands a heroic statue rose at Rotterdam in his honour; and he was invited with one clamorous and insistent voice to take his place as governor and dictator of the land he had come to save.

Such a splendid lure was too potent for Leicester's ambition to resist.

Without troubling to consult his Sovereign at home he accepted the ”throne” that was offered to him; and it was only after ten days had elapsed that he deigned to despatch a messenger to Elizabeth with news of his promotion. Meanwhile, and long before his envoy, who was delayed by storms on his journey, could reach the English Court, Elizabeth had heard news of her favourite's presumption, and her Royal anger blazed into flame at his insolence in daring to accept such honours without consulting her pleasure.

She promptly despatched Sir Thomas Heneage, his whilom rival, to the Netherlands armed with a scathing letter in which the Queen poured out the vials of her wrath on Leicester's head.

”How contemptuously we conceive ourselves to have been used,” she wrote, ”you shall by the bearer understand. We could never have imagined, had we not seen it fall out in experience, that a man raised up by ourself, and extraordinarily favoured by us above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly toucheth us in honour ... and therefore, our express pleasure and commandment is that, all delays and excuses laid apart, you do presently, upon the duty of your allegiance, obey and fulfil whatsoever the bearer hereof shall direct you to do in our name. Whereof fail you not, as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.”

One can imagine Leicester's feelings on reading such words of Royal anger and reproach from the woman who had always shown such indulgence to him. His impulse was to resign his governors.h.i.+p forthwith, and to hasten back to London to beg forgiveness on his knees; but before he could give effect to this decision he had learned that Burghley had interceded for him with the Queen to such effect that, supported by a pet.i.tion from the States-General, he was to be allowed to retain his office with Elizabeth's reluctant consent.

A few months of rule, however, were sufficient to disillusionise the Dutchmen. Leicester proved as incapable to govern a country, as to lead an army. His arrogance, his outspoken contempt for his subjects, his incompetence and his capricious temper, so thoroughly disgusted the nation that had welcomed him with open arms, that he was asked to resign his office as unanimously as he had been invited to accept it; and in November of 1587, the Earl returned ignominiously to England, eager to repair his damaged credit by at least making peace with his Queen.

To his delight he was received with as much cordiality as if he had done naught at all to earn his Lady's displeasure. Elizabeth had undoubtedly missed her favourite, her right-hand man. She had in fact become so accustomed to him that she could not be long happy unless he was at her side; and it was by her side that he rode and shared the acclamations with which her soldiers greeted her when she paid that historic visit to the camp at Tilbury on the eve of the Armada.

But Leicester's adventurous life was now drifting to its close. His health had for some time given him cause for alarm, and in August 1588, he left his Kenilworth home to seek relief by taking baths and drinking healing waters; and from Rycott he wrote the last of his many letters to the Queen.

”I most humbly beseech your Majesty,” he wrote, ”to pardon your poor old servant to be thus bold in sending to know how my gracious Lady doth and what ease of her late pain she finds, being the chiefest thing in this world I do pray for is for her to have good health and long life. For my own poor case I continue still your medicine, and find it amend much better than with any other thing that hath been given me. Thus hoping to find perfect cure at the bath, with the continuance of my wonted prayer for your Majesty's most happy preservation, I humbly kiss your foot. From your old lodging at Rycott this Thursday morning ready to take on my journey. By your Majesty's most faithful and obedient servant,-- R. LEYCESTER.”

But the Earl was not destined to reach the baths. His course was run. He got as far on his journey as Coventry; and there, on the 4th of September, he drew his last breath. Some said that his end was hastened by a dose of poison administered by his Countess, eager to pursue unchecked her intrigue with Christopher Blount; others that she accidentally gave him a draught from a bottle of poison which he had designed for her. But neither suspicion seems to have any evidence to support it.

Thus perished, little past the prime of life, a man who more than any other of his day drained the cup of pride and pleasure, to find its dregs exceeding bitter to the taste.

CHAPTER XXII

TWO IRISH BEAUTIES

In the winter of 1745 the city of Dublin was thrown into a state of high excitement by the appearance of a couple of girls from the wilds of Connaught, whose almost unearthly beauty won the instant homage of every man, from His Excellency the Earl of Harrington, then Lord Lieutenant, to the sourest jarvey who cracked a whip in her streets. To quote the pardonably extravagant language of a chronicler of the time,

”They swam into the social firmament of the Irish capital like twin planets of dazzling splendour, eclipsing all other constellations, as if the pall of night had been drawn over them.”

They had grown to girlhood, so the story ran from mouth to mouth, in a ruinous thatched house, in the shadow of Castle Coote, in County Roscommon, and were the daughters of John Gunning, a roystering, happy-go-lucky, dram-drinking squireen, whose most serious occupation in life was keeping the brokers' men on the right side of his door. And at the time this story opens they were living in a cottage, rented for a modest eight pounds a year, on the outskirts of Dublin, with their mother, who was a daughter of Lord Mayo.

To say that all Dublin was at the feet of the Gunning sisters, at the first sight of their lovely faces and dainty figures, is an unadorned statement of fact. The young ”bloods” of the capital were their slaves to a man, ready to spill the last drop of blood for them; and every gallant of the Viceregal Court drank toasts to their beauty, and vied with his rivals to win a smile or a word from them. Peg Woffington, it is said, threw up her arms in wonder at the sight of them, and, as she hugged each in turn, declared that she ”had never seen anything half so sweet”; and Tom Sheridan went down on his knees in involuntary homage to the majesty of their beauty.

It was Tom Sheridan who placed his stage wardrobe at their disposal when they were invited to the great Viceregal ball in honour of King George's birthday; and, attired as Lady Macbeth and Juliet respectively, they danced the stately minuet and rollicking country dances with such grace and abandon that lords and ladies stopped in their dances, and mounted on chairs and tables to feast their eyes on so rare and ravis.h.i.+ng a sight.

”With Betty as with Maria,” says Mr Frankfort Moore, ”the art of the dance had become part of her nature. Her languorous eyes were in sympathy with the voluptuous movements of her feet and lithe body, and the curves made by her arms formed an invisible chain that held everyone entranced. The caresses of her fingers, the coyness of her curtsies, the allurements of her movements--all the graces and charms inwoven that make up the poem of the minuet--became visible by the art of that exquisite girl, until all other dancers became common-place by comparison.”