her attention so often and so much in vain. But a
circumstance occurred soon after which totally changed the nature of
their apprehensions respecting her future conduct, and rendered her
anticipated choice of a husband no longer an object of hope and joy, but
of general dissatisfaction and alarm.

Just when the whispered scandal of the court had apprized him how
obvious to all beholders the partiality of his sovereign had
become,--just when her rejection of the proposals of so many foreign
princes had confirmed the suspicion that her heart had given itself at
home,--just, in short, when every thing conspired to sanction hopes
which under any other circumstances would have appeared no less
visionary than presumptuous,--at the very juncture most favorable to his
ambition, but most perilous to his reputation, lord Robert Dudley lost
his wife, and by a fate equally sudden and mysterious.

This unfortunate lady had been sent by her husband, under the conduct of
sir Richard Verney, one of his retainers,--but for what reason or under
what pretext does not appear,--to Cumnor House in Berkshire, a solitary
mansion inhabited by Anthony Foster, also a dependent of Dudley's and
bound to him by particular obligations. Here she soon after met with her
death; and Verney and Foster, who appear to have been alone in the
house with her, gave out that it happened by an accidental fall down
stairs. But this account, from various causes, gained so little credit
in the neighbourhood, that reports of the most sinister import were
quickly propagated. These discourses soon reached the ears of Thomas
Lever, a prebendary of Coventry and a very conscientious person, who
immediately addressed to the secretaries of state an earnest letter,
still extant, beseeching them to cause strict inquiry to be made into
the case, as it was commonly believed that the lady had been murdered:
but he mentioned no particular grounds of this belief, and it cannot now
be ascertained whether any steps were taken in consequence of his
application. If there were, they certainly produced no satisfactory
explanation of the circumstance; for not only the popular voice, which
was ever hostile to Dudley, continued to accuse him as the contriver of
her fate, but Cecil himself, in a memorandum drawn up some years after
of reasons against the queen's making him her husband, mentions among
other objections, "that he is infamed by the death of his wife."

Whether the thorough i