thus mingling the peasant blood
of Hoggins with the Royal strain of the "Merrie Monarch,"--and survived
until the year 1873. Her daughter had for husband the Right Honourable
Henry Manvers Pierrepoint, and became grandmother to the present Duke of
Wellington, who thus has for great-grandmother Sarah Hoggins, the rustic
beauty who milked cows and was wooed in the Shropshire orchard by "Mr
Jones, the highwayman," when George the Third was King.

CHAPTER XXI

THE FAVOURITE OF A QUEEN

When Robert Dudley was cradled in the year 1532 the ball of Fortune was
already at his feet, awaiting the necessary vigour and enterprise to
kick it. He had, it is true, no great lineage to boast of. Cecil spoke
contemptuously of him in later and envious years as grandson of a mere
squire and son of a knight; but the so-called squire was none other than
Edmond Dudley, the shrewd financier and crafty-tongued minion of Henry
VII., who, with Empson for ally, filled his sovereign's purse with
ill-gotten gold, and paid for his enterprise with his head when the
eighth Henry set himself to the paying off of old scores. His father,
the knight, was that John Dudley, King Henry's trusted friend and
executor of his will, Admiral and Earl Marshal of England, whose
splendid gifts and boundless ambition won a dukedom for him, and made
him for a time more powerful than his King.

[Illustration: ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER]

Such was the parentage of Robert Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland's
fifth son, who inherited, with his grandfather's scheming brain and
plausible tongue, the ambition and love of splendour which made his
father the most brilliant subject of two kings. And this great, if
dangerous heritage was not long in manifesting itself in the young
lordling, who was destined to add to his family's story a chapter more
romantic and dazzling than that of which his father was the hero.

As a boy in the schoolroom he was quick to show gifts of mind almost
phenomenal in one so young. Latin and Italian, mathematics and abstruse
sciences came as easily to this scion of the Dudleys as reading and
arithmetic to less-dowered boys. And with this precocity of mind he
developed physical graces and skill no less remarkable until, by the
time he was well in his 'teens, few grown men could ride a horse, couch
a lance, or speed an arrow with such skill as he.

At the Royal Court, where his ducal father was autocrat, the handsome
boy of all the