My Lord of Leicester was to have his cure. The physicians insisted upon it. It is chronicled in Gilbert Talbot’s letter with all the importance which would attend the bulletins of the health of a king. The Queen never resented a fuss of this kind made over her pampered darling. In his stuffed and padded Court costume, his feathered head-dress, and his jewels one cannot detect in him one of the virile qualities which so dominated her imagination. His treacheries were winked at, his vices condoned, even the people who accused him most violently of the murder of his first wife, Amy Robsart, when in perplexity crawled to his feet, either literally like poor Lady Catherine Grey, or in abject letters like Lady Lennox, who was one of his bitterest accusers and who had suffered under the spies he sent into her very house. Let us for a few moments recall the growth of this personage, this veritable bay-tree. He was just Robert Dudley, a younger son, the fifth of a ruined family lying under attainder—the Dukes of Northumberland. Mary of England restored him to his title, and drew him out of nonentity and poverty by appointing him Master of the Ordnance at the siege of S. Quentin. As soldier and courtier he certainly came into contact with the Princess Elizabeth, whose visits to Court were finally forced upon her unwilling sister. Elizabeth had scarcely been on the throne a few months before she indulged with much too evident relief in flirtations with him, as a counterblast to the incessant negotiations with the ambassadors of her successive foreign suitors. She coquetted with him in her boat, she kept his portrait in a secret cabinet, she showed off her learning, her airs and graces before him, she danced with him, and when she formally created him Earl of Leicester she “could not refrain from putting her hand in his neck, smilingly tickling him.” This honour, by the way, it will be remembered, she pretended to confer on him in order that his rank should fit him for marriage with Mary Queen of Scots, and so avoid the dangers and difficulties to England which would arise from her marriage with Darnley. There never was a pretence so thin. Elizabeth made a great show of her willingness to bestow on another her “brother and best friend, whom she would have married herself had she minded to take a husband.” Since she had decided to die a virgin she held that such a procedure in regard to Leicester would “free her mind of all fears and suspicions to be offended by any usurpation before her death, being assured that he was so loving and trusty that he would never suffer any such thing to be attempted in her time.” While she openly advertised Leicester as her favourite, she dangled him as a prize over the head of her chief enemy. She always loved playing with fire, and it is well that this time she did not burn her fingers, for Leicester was the complete courtier and could not decide between the two queens. In his eyes Mary had as much chance of ruling England as his present mistress. Mary did not at the beginning of her career in Scotland appear very anxious for his wooing. All this helped Elizabeth. Creighton clearly takes the view that the latter promoted the Darnley marriage by the very pushing of Leicester’s claims. Whether or not he was personally commendable to Mary, it was greatly to his disadvantage, that, as creature of Elizabeth, he should be thrust upon her enemy.

Just at that period Leicester’s familiarity towards the Queen touched gross impudence. We see him in the royal tennis-court pausing in a match against the premier peer of England, the Duke of Norfolk, to wipe his face with the handkerchief quickly filched from the Queen’s hand as she sat amongst the onlookers. The Duke raged, offered violence, and, unfortunately for royal dignity, Elizabeth’s manner showed that she took the part of Leicester. She had already bestowed on him while a commoner the Garter. The Order of St. Michael was his next honour, and he was soon created Master of the Horse, Steward of the Household, Chancellor of Oxford, Ranger of the Forests south of Trent, and, later on, Captain-General of the English forces in the Netherlands. When age and his last illness brooded over him his queen planned for him a last dazzling post—a new creation—in the Lieutenancy of England and Ireland. Despite the scandals attached to his three marriages,^[37] he maintained his place in the eyes of Elizabeth, and only in after years seriously earned her displeasure. He had the rare art of “keeping on the right side” of Lord Burghley, between whom and himself a sort of armed neutrality existed, except when mutual advantage found them acting heartily in concert. Leicester, as all his history shows, was, like Buckingham, a gay dog, a ladies’ man. Pretty women hovered about him at Court—vide the letter from Gilbert Talbot under date May 11, 1573, quoted in full in a previous chapter—he had to keep them at peace not to give offence. He could play with their love, enjoy it, go to utmost lengths, so long as the Queen believed that in his heart no other woman could take her place. He entertained largely, he lived and dressed as befitted his position. It was above all highly important that he should keep his health in order, preserve the elegant lines of his soldier’s figure, and defer as long as possible the days when he would, in his own phrase, “grow high-coloured and red-faced.”

When he was ordered to Buxton it was imperative that he should be properly received and housed, and not lodged in the low wooden sheds which were used by the ordinary public during their “cure,” and where their fare seems to have consisted of “oat cakes, with a viand which the hosts called mutton, but which the guests strongly suspected to be dog.”