hat it cost him prodigious pains
to equip the king, at short notice, with so much of artificial dignity
and borrowed wisdom as might enable him to pass successfully through the
ordeal of Walsingham's examination. But his labor was not thrown away;
for James, who really possessed considerable quickness of parts and a
competent share of book learning, played with such plausibility the part
assigned him, that even this sagacious statesman is believed to have
returned impressed with a higher opinion of his abilities than any part
of his after conduct was found to warrant.

Her increasing apprehensions from the hostility of the king of Spain,
caused Elizabeth to cultivate with added zeal the friendship of the
northern powers of Europe, and in 1582 she sent the garter to the king
of Denmark as a pledge of amity; making at the same time a fruitless
endeavour to obtain for English merchant ships some remission of the
duties newly levied by the Danish sovereign on the passage of the Sound.
It was the prudent practice of her majesty to intrust these embassies of
compliment to young noblemen lately come into possession of their
estates, who, for her favor and their own honor, were willing to
discharge them in a splendid manner at their private expense. The Danish
mission was the price which she exacted from Peregrine Bertie, lately
called up to the house of peers as lord Willoughby of Eresby in right of
his mother, for her reluctant and ungracious recognition of his
undeniable title to this dignity. On the occurrence of this first
mention of a high-spirited nobleman, afterwards celebrated for a
brilliant valor which rendered him the idol of popular fame, the
remarkable circumstances of his birth and parentage must not be omitted.
His mother, only daughter and heir of the ninth lord Willoughby by a
Spanish lady of high birth who had been maid of honor to queen Catherine
of Arragon, was first the ward and afterwards the third wife of Charles
Brandon duke of Suffolk, by whom she had two sons, formerly mentioned as
victims to the sweating-sickness.

Few ladies of that age chose long to continue in the unprotected state
of widowhood; and the duchess had already re-entered the matrimonial
state with Richard Bertie, a person of obscure birth but liberal
education, when the accession of Mary exposed her to all the cruelties
and oppressions exercised without remorse by the popish persecutors of
that reign upon such of their private enemie