Hertford with lady Catherine Gray, notwithstanding the sentence of
nullity which the queen had caused to be so precipitately pronounced and
the punishment which she had tyrannically inflicted on the parties, had
at length been duly established by a legal decision in which her majesty
was compelled to acquiesce. The eldest son of the earl assumed in
consequence his father's second title of lord Beauchamp, and became
undoubted heir to all the claims of the Suffolk line. About the year
1585, this young nobleman married, unknown to his father, a daughter of
sir Richard Rogers, of Brianston, a gentleman of ancient family, whose
son had already been permitted to intermarry with a daughter of the
house of Seymour. It might have been hoped that the earl of Hertford,
from his own long and unmerited sufferings on a similar account, would
have learned such a lesson of indulgence towards the affections of his
children, that a match of greater disparity might have received from
him a ready forgiveness. But he inherited, it seems, too much of the
unfeeling haughtiness of his high-born mother; and in the fury of his
resentment on discovery of this connexion of his son's, he made no
scruple of separating by force the young couple, in direct defiance of
the sacred tie which bound them to each other. Lord Beauchamp bore in
the beginning this arbitrary treatment with a dutiful submission, by
which he flattered himself that the heart of his father must sooner or
later be touched; but at length, finding all entreaties vain, and seeing
reason to believe that a settled plan was entertained by the earl of
estranging him for ever from his wife, he broke on a sudden from the
solitary mansion which had been assigned him as his place of abode, or
of banishment, and was hastening to London to throw himself at the feet
of her majesty and beseech her interposition, when a servant of his
father's overtook and forcibly detained him.

Well aware that his nearness to the crown must have rendered peculiarly
offensive to the queen what she would regard as his presumption in
marrying without her knowledge and consent, he at first suspected her
majesty as the author of this attack on his liberty; but being soon
informed of her declaration, "that he was no prisoner of hers, and the
man had acted without warrant," he addressed to lord Burleigh an earnest
petition for redress. In this remarkable piece, after a statement of his
case, he begs to submit himself by