ature of the Contest--wealth and Strength
of the Provinces--Power of the Dutch and English People--Affection
of the Hollanders for the Queen--Secret Purposes of Leicester--
Wretched condition of English Troops--The Nassaus and Hohenlo--The
Earl's Opinion of them--Clerk and Killigrew--Interview with the
States Government General offered to the Earl--Discussions on the
Subject--The Earl accepts the Office--His Ambition and Mistakes--His
Installation at the Hague--Intimations of the Queen's Displeasure--
Deprecatory Letters of Leicester--Davison's Mission to England--
Queen's Anger and Jealousy--Her angry Letters to the Earl and the
States--Arrival of Davison--Stormy Interview with the Queen--The
second one is calmer--Queen's Wrath somewhat mitigated--Mission of
Heneago to the States--Shirley sent to England by the Earl--His
Interview with Elizabeth

At last the Earl of Leicester came. Embarking at Harwich, with a fleet of
fifty ships, and attended "by the flower and chief gallants of
England"--the Lords Sheffield, Willoughby, North, Burroughs, Sir Gervase
Clifton, Sir William Russell, Sir Robert Sidney, and others among the
number--the new lieutenant-general of the English forces in the
Netherlands arrived on the 19th December, 1585, at Flushing.

His nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, and Count Maurice of Nassau, with a body
of troops and a great procession of civil functionaries; were in
readiness to receive him, and to escort him to the lodgings prepared for
him.

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was then fifty-four years of age. There
are few personages in English history whose adventures, real or
fictitious, have been made more familiar to the world than his have been,
or whose individuality has been presented in more picturesque fashion, by
chronicle, tragedy, or romance. Born in the same day of the month and
hour of the day with the Queen, but two years before her birth, the
supposed synastry of their destinies might partly account, in that age of
astrological superstition, for the influence which he perpetually
exerted. They had, moreover, been fellow-prisoners together, in the
commencement of the reign of Mary, and it is possible that he may have
been the medium through which the indulgent expressions of Philip II.
were conveyed to the Princess Elizabeth.

His grandfather, John Dudley, that "caterpillar of the commonwealth," who
lost his head in the first year of Henry VIII. as