His nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, and Count Maurice of Nassau, with a body
of troops and a great procession of civil functionaries; were in
readiness to receive him, and to escort him to the lodgings prepared for
him.

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,