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 a reward for the grist
which he brought to the mill of Henry VII.; his father, the mighty Duke
of Northumberland, who rose out of the wreck of an obscure and ruined
family to almost regal power, only to perish, like his predecessor, upon
the scaffold, had bequeathed him nothing save rapacity, ambition, and the
genius to succeed. But Elizabeth seemed to ascend the throne only to
bestow gifts upon her favourite. Baronies and earldoms, stars and
garters, manors and monopolies, castles and forests, church livings and
college chancellorships, advowsons and sinecures, emoluments and
dignities, the most copious and the most exalted, were conferred upon him
in breathless succession. Wine, oil, currants, velvets, 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, c