ced a libertine. How
she, refined, faithful, heroic, should have been led astray, is hardly
intelligible. She must have now been several years over twenty, probably
twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and in her long after-life she bore herself
as entitled to all social respect. She was allowed it by every one,
except her Mistress, who never restored her to favour. By the Cecils she
was treated with unfailing regard. In the whole of her struggle, by her
husband's side, and over his grave, for his and her son's rights, not a
whisper was heard of the blot on her fair fame. If Camden had not
spoken, and if Ralegh and she had not stood mute, it would have been
easy to believe that the imagined liaison was simply a secret marriage
resented as such by the Queen, as, two years before, she had resented
Essex's secret marriage to Sidney's widow. That seems to have been
asserted by their friends, at the first explosion of the scandal. A
letter, written on the eve of Ralegh's committal to the Tower, by one
who manifestly did not hold the benevolent opinion, says, after a
spitefully prophetic comparison of Ralegh with his own

Hermit poor in pensive place obscure:

'It is affirmed that they are married; but the Queen is most fiercely
incensed.'

[Sidenote: _Harder to disbelieve._]

That the royal anger had a better foundation than the mere jealousy of
affection or of domination, it is to be feared, is the inevitable inference
from the evidence, however concise and circumstantial. Had contradiction
been possible, Camden would have been contradicted in 1615 by Ralegh and
his wife. Cecil alluded to Ralegh's offence in 1592 as 'brutish.' With all
his zeal to indulge the Queen's indignation, he could not have used the
term of a secret marriage. The prevailing absence of Court talk on the
occurrence is not traceable to any doubt of its true character.
Courtiers simply believed it dangerous to be outspoken on a matter
affecting the purity of the Virgin Queen's household circle. Her prudery
may indeed go some way towards accounting for, if not excusing, the
fault. It was dangerous for one of her counsellors to be suspected of an
attachment. So late as March, 1602, Cecil was writing earnestly to Carew
in repudiation of a rumour that he was like to be enchanted for love or
marriage. Almost borrowing Ralegh's words to himself of ten years
earlier, he declares upon his soul he knows none on earth that he was,
or, if he might, would be, marri