delinquencies of filling his purse by the sale of honours and dignities,
by violent ejectments from land, fraudulent titles, rapacious enclosures
of commons, by taking bribes for matters of justice, grace, and
supplication to the royal authority, he was accused of forging various
letters to the Queen, often to ruin his political adversaries, and of
plottings to entrap them into conspiracies, playing first the comrade and
then the informer. The list of his murders and attempts to murder was
almost endless. "His lordship hath a special fortune," saith the Jesuit,
"that when he desireth any woman's favour, whatsoever person standeth in
his way hath the luck to die quickly." He was said to have poisoned
Alice Drayton, Lady Lennox, Lord Sussex, Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, Lord
Sheffield, whose widow he married and then poisoned, Lord Essex, whose
widow he also married, and intended to poison, but who was said to have
subsequently poisoned him--besides murders or schemes for murder of
various other individuals, both French and English. "He was a rare
artist in poison," said Sir Robert Naunton, and certainly not Caesar
Borgia, nor his father or sister, was more accomplished in that difficult
profession than was Dudley, if half the charges against him could be
believed. Fortunately for his fame, many of them were proved to be
false. Sir Henry Sidney, lord deputy of Ireland, at the time of the
death of Lord Essex, having caused a diligent inquiry to be made into
that dark affair, wrote to the council that it was usual for the Earl to
fall into a bloody flux when disturbed in his mind, and that his body
when opened showed no signs of poison. It is true that Sir Henry,
although an honourable man, was Leicester's brother-in-law, and that
perhaps an autopsy was not conducted at that day in Ireland on very
scientific principles.

His participation in the strange death of his first wife was a matter of
current belief among his contemporaries. "He is infamed by the death of