the truth, none could prove it then; and who shall
succeed now? It is more generous and certainly more probable to suppose
that Amy Robsart by her own act--wilful, at the dictate of a brain
disordered by grief, or accidental--removed the barrier to her husband's
passion for his Queen. Certain it is that Dudley affected, if he did not
actually feel, deep sorrow at his wife's death, and that he spared no
pains to solve the mystery that surrounded it.

His grief, however, seems to have been short-lived; for before the
unhappy Amy had been many months in her grave we find him more ardent
than ever in his devotion to Elizabeth, whose hand he was now free to
claim. But the Queen, who was nothing if not an arrant coquette, was in
no mood to be caught even by the man she loved. She drove him to
distraction by her caprices. One moment she would "rap him on the
knuckles," only to smile her sweetest on him the next. One day she would
flaunt in his face a patent of peerage, as evidence of her affection;
the next she would cut the parchment to pieces under his nose, laughing
the while. She roused him to frenzies of jealousy by dallying with one
Royal offer of marriage after another--now it was Philip, the Spanish
King, now His Majesty of Sweden--canvassing their respective merits and
charms in his presence, and flaring into angry retorts when he ventured
to ridicule his august rivals.

She carried her tortures even to the extent of seeming to encourage a
match between her favourite and Mary Queen of Scots; and, to make him a
worthy suitor for a Royal hand, granted him the peerage she had so long
dangled before him. Robert Dudley as Baron Denbigh and Earl of Leicester
was no unfit husband for her "Royal sister"; certainly a much more
possible personage than "Sir Robert" could have been. But she never
intended thus to lose her most acceptable admirer, and was
relieved--though she affected to be angry--when news came that Mary had
chosen Darnley for her husband. Thus was Leicester's loss Elizabeth's
gain; and his reward was that he took still a higher place in her
favour.

If he was not now King Consort in name, he was, at least, in place and
power. When the Queen fancied she was dying of small-pox she announced
her wish that he should be appointed Protector of the Realm at a
princely salary; and, when she recovered, he was empowered to act as her
deputy--to receive ambassadors, to interview ministers, and to sit in
her seat at the