jutor in this murder was afterwards taken for a
felony in the marches of Wales, and offering to publish the manner
of the aforesaid murder, was privately made away in the prison by the
Earl's appointment; and Sir Richard Varney the other, dying about the
same time in London, cried miserably, and blasphemed God, and said to
a person of note (who hath related the same to others since), not long
before his death, that all the devils in hell did tear him in pieces.
Forster, likewise, after this fact, being a man formerly addicted to
hospitality, company, mirth, and music, was afterwards observed to
forsake all this, and with much melancholy and pensiveness (some say
with madness) pined and drooped away. The wife also of Bald Butter,
kinsman to the Earl, gave out the whole fact a little before her death.
Neither are these following passages to be forgotten, that as soon as
ever she was murdered, they made great haste to bury her before the
coroner had given in his inquest (which the Earl himself condemned as
not done advisedly), which her father, or Sir John Robertsett (as I
suppose), hearing of, came with all speed hither, caused her corpse to
be taken up, the coroner to sit upon her, and further inquiry to be made
concerning this business to the full; but it was generally thought that
the Earl stopped his mouth, and made up the business betwixt them; and
the good Earl, to make plain to the world the great love he bare to her
while alive, and what a grief the loss of so virtuous a lady was to his
tender heart, caused (though the thing, by these and other means, was
beaten into the heads of the principal men of the University of Oxford)
her body to be reburied in St, Mary's Church in Oxford, with great
pomp and solemnity. It is remarkable, when Dr. Babington, the Earl's
chaplain, did preach the funeral sermon, he tript once or twice in
his speech, by recommending to their memories that virtuous lady so
pitifully murdered, instead of saying pitifully slain. This Earl, after
all his murders and poisonings, was himself poisoned by that which
was prepared for others (some say by his wife at Cornbury Lodge before
mentioned), though Baker in his Chronicle would have it at Killingworth;
anno 1588." [Ashmole's Antiquities of Berkshire, vol.i., p.149. The
tradition as to Leicester's death was thus communicated by Ben Jonson to
Drummond of Hawthornden:--"The Earl of Leicester gave a bottle of liquor
to his Lady, which he willed her to u