ecclesiastical benefices, university headships, licences to preach, to
teach, to ride, to sail, to pick and to steal, all brought "grist to his
mill." His grandfather, "the horse leach and shearer," never filled his
coffers more rapidly than did Lord Robert, the fortunate courtier. Of
his early wedlock with the ill-starred Amy Robsart, of his nuptial
projects with the Queen, of his subsequent marriages and mock-marriages
with Douglas Sheffield and Lettice of Essex, of his plottings,
poisonings, imaginary or otherwise, of his countless intrigues, amatory
and political--of that luxuriant, creeping, flaunting, all-pervading
existence which struck its fibres into the mould, and coiled itself
through the whole fabric, of Elizabeth's life and reign--of all this the
world has long known too much to render a repetition needful here. The
inmost nature and the secret deeds of a man placed so high by wealth and
station, can be seen but darkly through the glass of contemporary record.
There was no tribunal to sit upon his guilt. A grandee could be judged
only when no longer a favourite, and the infatuation of Elizabeth for
Leicester terminated only with his life. He stood now upon the soil of
the Netherlands in the character of a "Messiah," yet he has been charged
with crimes sufficient to send twenty humbler malefactors to the gibbet.
"I think," said a most malignant arraigner of the man, in a published
pamphlet, "that the Earl of Leicester hath more blood lying upon his head
at this day, crying for vengeance, than ever had private man before, were
he never so wicked."

Certainly the mass of misdemeanours and infamies hurled at the head of
the favourite by that "green-coated Jesuit," father Parsons, under the
title of 'Leycester's Commonwealth,' were never accepted as literal
verities; yet the value of the precept, to calumniate boldly, with the
certainty that much of the calumny would last for ever, was never better
illustrated than in the case of Robert Dudley. Besides the lesser