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
delinquencies of filling his purse by the sale of honours and dignities,
by violent ejectments from land, fraudulent titles, rapacious enclosures
of commons, by taking bribes for matters of justice, grace, and
supplication to the royal authority, he was accused of forging various
letters to the Queen, often to ruin his political adversaries, and of
plottings to entrap them into conspiracies, playing first the comrade and
then the informer. The list of his murders and attempts to murder was
almost endless. "His lordship hath a special fortune," saith the Jesuit,
"that when he desireth any woman's favour, whatsoever person standeth in
his way hath the luck to die quickly." He was said to have poisoned Alice
Drayton, Lady Lennox, Lord Sussex, Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, Lord
Sheffield, whose widow he married and then poisoned, Lord Essex, whose
widow he also married, and intended to poison, but who was said to have
subsequently poisoned him--besides murders or schemes for murder of
various other individuals, both French and English. "He was a rare artist
in poison," said Sir Robert Naunton, and certainly not Caesar Borgia, nor
his father or sister, was more accomplished in that difficult profession
than was Dudley, if half the charges against him could be believed.
Fortunately for his fame, many of them were proved to be false. Sir Henry
Sidney, lord deputy of Ireland, at the time of the death of Lord Essex,
having caused a diligent inquiry to be made into that dark affair, wrote
to the council that it was usual for the Earl to fall into a bloody flux
when disturbed in his mind, and that his body when opened showed no signs
of poison. It is true that Sir Henry, although an honourable man, was
Leicester's brother-in-law, and that perhaps an autopsy was not conducted
at that day in Ireland on very scientific principles.

His participation in the strange death of his first wife was a matter of
current belief among his contemporaries. "He is infamed by the death of
his wife," said Burghley, and the tale has since become so interwoven
with classic and legendary fiction, as well as with more authentic
history, that the phantom of the murdered Amy Robsart is sure to arise at
every