the good Earl, to make plain to the world the great love he bare to her
while alive, and what a grief the loss of so virtuous a lady was to his
tender heart, caused (though the thing, by these and other means, was
beaten into the heads of the principal men of the University of Oxford)
her body to be reburied in St, Mary's Church in Oxford, with great
pomp and solemnity. It is remarkable, when Dr. Babington, the Earl's
chaplain, did preach the funeral sermon, he tript once or twice in
his speech, by recommending to their memories that virtuous lady so
pitifully murdered, instead of saying pitifully slain. This Earl, after
all his murders and poisonings, was himself poisoned by that which
was prepared for others (some say by his wife at Cornbury Lodge before
mentioned), though Baker in his Chronicle would have it at Killingworth;
anno 1588." [Ashmole's Antiquities of Berkshire, vol.i., p.149. The
tradition as to Leicester's death was thus communicated by Ben Jonson to
Drummond of Hawthornden:--"The Earl of Leicester gave a bottle of liquor
to his Lady, which he willed her to use in any faintness, which she,
after his returne from court, not knowing it was poison, gave him, and
so he died."--BEN JONSON'S INFORMATION TO DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN, MS.,
SIR ROBERT SIBBALD'S COPY.]

The same accusation has been adopted and circulated by the author of
Leicester's Commonwealth, a satire written directly against the Earl of
Leicester, which loaded him with the most horrid crimes, and, among
the rest, with the murder of his first wife. It was alluded to in the
Yorkshire Tragedy, a play erroneously ascribed to Shakespeare, where
a baker, who determines to destroy all his family, throws his wife
downstairs, with this allusion to the supposed murder of Leicester's
lady,--

"The only way to charm a woman's tongue