ad two husbands, Sir William
Rayner and Sir Thomas Compton,[13] brother to the Earl of Northampton.
She was in high favour at Court, and she was created Countess of
Buckingham just a year later than the time with which we are now
dealing. As Buckingham favoured the match, of course the King favoured
it also; and, as has been seen, Winwood, the Secretary of State,
favoured it, simply because Bacon did not.

On the other side, among the active opponents of the match, were Bacon
the Lord Keeper, Lord and Lady Burghley, Lord Danvers, Lord Denny, Sir
Thomas and Lady Howard, and Sir Edmund and Lady Withipole.

Suddenly, to Coke's great satisfaction, Lady Elizabeth became, as he
supposed, calm and quiet. It was his habit to go to bed at nine
o'clock, and to get up very early. One night he went to bed at his
usual hour, under the impression that his wife was settling down
nicely and resigning herself to the inevitable. While he was in his
beauty-sleep, soon after ten, that excellent lady quietly left the
house with her daughter, and walked some little distance to a coach,
which she had engaged to be in waiting for them at an appointed place.
In this coach they travelled by unfrequented and circuitous roads,
until they arrived at a house near Oatlands, a place belonging to the
Earl of Argyll, but rented at that time by Lady Elizabeth's cousin,
Sir Edmund Withipole. The distance from Holborn to Oatlands, as the
crow flies, is about twenty miles; but, by the roundabout roads which
the fugitives took in order to prevent attempts to trace them, the
distance must have been considerable, and the journey, in the clumsy
coach of the period, over the rutted highways and the still worse
by-roads of those times, must have been long and wearisome. Oatlands
is close to Weybridge, to the south-west of London, in Surrey, just
over the boundary of Middlesex and about a mile to the south of the
river Thames.

In Sir Edmund Withipole's house Lady Elizabeth and her daughter lived
in the strictest seclusion, and all precautions were taken to prevent
the place of their retreat from becoming known. And great caution was
necessary, for Lady Elizabeth and Frances were almost within a dozen
miles of Stoke Pogis, their country home; so that they would have been
in danger of being recognised, if they had appeared outside the house.

But Lady Elizabeth was not idle in her voluntary imprisonment. She
conceived the idea that the best method of preventing