Bridget had not been in her grave four months when the great Lord
Burghley died. Coke attended his funeral, and a funeral being
obviously a fitting occasion on which to talk about that still more
dreary ceremony, a wedding, Coke took advantage of it to broach the
question of a marriage between himself and Lady Elizabeth Hatton. He
broached it both to her father, the new Lord Burghley, and to her
uncle, the much more talented Robert. Whatever their astonishment may
have been, each of these Cecils promised to offer no opposition to the
match. They probably reflected that the Attorney-General was a man in
a powerful position, and that, with his own great wealth combined with
that of Lady Elizabeth Hatton, he might possibly prove of service to
the Cecil family in the future.

How the match, proposed under such conditions, came about, history
does not inform us, but, within six months of Bridget's funeral, her
widower embalmed her memory by marrying Elizabeth Hatton, a girl
fifteen years her junior.

If any writer possessed of imagination should choose to make a novel
on the foundation of this simple story, he may describe to his readers
how the cross-grained and unattractive Coke contrived to induce the
fair Lady Elizabeth Hatton to accept him for a husband. The present
writer cannot say how this miracle was worked, for the simple reason
that he does not know. One incident in connection with the marriage,
however, is a matter of history. Elizabeth was not sufficiently proud
of her prospective bride-groom to desire to stand beside him at a
wedding before a large, fashionable, and critical assemblage in a
London church. If he would have her at all, she insisted that he must
take her in the only way in which he could get her, namely, by a
clandestine marriage, in a private house, with only two or three