and, wasted as it was by wars and tumults, and that in his
tennis-court at Norwich he reckoned himself equal to many a
prince.--These demonstrations were all insincere; the duke remained
steady to his purpose, and his correspondence with the queen of Scots
was not for a single day intermitted in submission to his Sovereign. But
he felt that it was now time to take off the mask; and fully confiding
in the strength of his party, he requested the earl of Leicester
immediately to open the marriage proposal to her majesty, and solicit
her consent. This the favorite promised, but for his own ends continued
to defer the business from day to day.

Cecil, who had recently been taken into the consultations of the duke,
urged upon him with great force the expediency of being himself the
first to name his wishes to the queen; but Norfolk, either from
timidity, or, more probably, from an ill-founded reliance on Leicester's
sincerity, and a distrust, equally misplaced, of that of Cecil, whom he
was conscious of having ill treated, neglected to avail himself of this
wise and friendly counsel, by which he might yet have been preserved.
Leicester, who watched all his motions, was at length satisfied that his
purpose was effected,--the victim was inveigled beyond the power of
retreat or escape, and it was time for the decoy-bird to slip out of the
snare.

He summoned to his aid a fit of sickness, the never-failing resource of
the courtiers of Elizabeth in case of need. His pitying mistress, as he
had doubtless anticipated, hastened to pay him a charitable visit at his
own house, and he then suffered her to discover that his malady was
occasioned by some momentous secret which weighed upon his spirits; and
after due ostentation of penitence and concern, at length revealed to
her the whole of the negotiations for the marriage of the duke with the
queen of Scots, including the part which he had himself taken in that
business.

Elizabeth, who seems by no means to have suspected that matters had gone
so far, or that so many of her nobles were implicated in this
transaction, was moved with indignation, and commanded the immediate
attendance of the duke, who, conscious of his delinquency, and
disquieted by the change which he thought he had observed in the
countenance of her majesty and the carriage towards him of his brother
peers, had sometime before quitted the court, and retired first to his
house in London, and afterwards to his seat of