s Queen. He lost his heart
to the lovely wife of Lord Sheffield; and when her husband died
conveniently and mysteriously (it was said that Leicester, with his
doctor's help, removed him by a dose of poison) it was not long before
he wedded her in secret, only just in time to make her child, whose
name, "Robert Dudley," made no concealment of his parentage, legitimate.
Before the child was many months old, however, the father was caught in
the toils of another charmer, my Lady Essex, and after deserting his
wife and, it is said, unsuccessfully trying to poison her, he made Lady
Essex his Countess, in defiance of that secret wedding with Sheffield's
widow.

When news of this double treachery, with the ugly suspicions that
attended it, reached the Queen's ears, her rage knew no bounds. She
vowed that she would send her faithless lover to the Tower, that his
head should pay forfeit for his false heart; and it was only when her
anger had had time to cool that more moderate counsels prevailed, and
she was content to banish him to a virtual prison at Greenwich.

It was not long, however, before her heart, always weak where her "sweet
Robin" was concerned, relented; and he was summoned back to Court to
resume his place at her side. In fact his very falseness and his follies
seemed to make him even dearer to the infatuated woman than his loyalty
and his love-making had ever done.

These days of silken ease were, however, soon to be changed. When, in
1585, Elizabeth wished to send her soldiers to help Holland in the
struggle with Spain, her choice fell on Leicester to take command of the
expedition, though his only experience of war had been more than a
quarter of a century earlier, when young Dudley had left the Tower and
his fellow Princess-captive's side to give his sword its baptism of
blood in Picardy. At Flushing and Leyden, Utrecht and Rotterdam, the
great English Earl and friend of England's Queen was received with the
rapturous homage due to a Sovereign deliverer rather than to a subject.
All Holland abandoned herself to a delirium of joy and festivity, and
before he had been many weeks in the Netherlands a heroic statue rose at
Rotterdam in his honour; and he was invited with one clamorous and
insistent voice to take his place as governor and dictator of the land
he had come to save.

Such a splendid lure was too potent for Leicester's ambition to resist.
Without troubling to consult his Sovereign at home he accepte