“That my lord contrived the killing of his wife
so that he might have liberty to marry your Majesty,
and that your Majesty was privy to the deed.”
He spoke out boldly, and hurried on before she could
let loose her wrath. “It is still in your
power, madame, to save your honour, which is now in
peril. But there is only one way in which you
can accomplish it. If you put from you all thought
of marrying Lord Robert, England will believe that
de Quadra and those others lied. If you persist
and carry out your intention, you proclaim the truth
of his report; and you see what must inevitably follow.”
She saw indeed, and, seeing, was afraid.
Within a few hours of that interview she delivered
her answer to
Cecil, which was that she had no intention of marrying
Dudley.
Because of her fear she saved her honour by sacrificing
her heart, by renouncing marriage with the only man
she could have taken for her mate of all who had wooed
her. Yet the wound of that renunciation was slow
to heal. She trifled with the notion of other
marriages, but ever and anon, in her despair, perhaps,
we see her turning longing eyes towards the handsome
Lord Robert, later made Earl of Leicester. Once,
indeed, some six years after Amy’s death, there
was again some talk of her marrying him, which was
quickly quelled by a reopening of the question of how
Amy died. Between these two, between the fulfilment
of her desire and his ambition, stood the irreconcilable
ghost of his poor murdered wife.
Perhaps it was some thought of this that found expression
in her passionate outburst when she learnt of the
birth of Mary Stuart’s child: “The
Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son; and I am but
a barren stock.”
The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
Sir Walter was met on landing at Plymouth from his
ill-starred voyage to El Dorado by Sir Lewis Stukeley,
which was but natural, seeing that Sir Lewis was not
only Vice-Admiral of Devon, but also Sir Walter’s
very good friend and kinsman.
If Sir Walter doubted whether it was in his quality
as kinsman or as Vice-Admiral that Sir Lewis met him,
the cordiality of the latter’s embrace and the
noble entertainment following at the house of Sir
Christopher Hare, near the port, whither Sir Lewis
conducted him, set this doubt at rest and relighted
the lamp of hope in the despairing soul of our adventurer.
In Sir Lewis he saw only his kinsman—his
very good friend and kinsman, to insist upon Stukeley’s
own description of himself—at a time when
of all others in his crowded life he needed the support
of a kinsman and the guidance of a friend.
