The farmer and his wife, who had already grown attached to their pleasant guest, were by no means unwilling to accept the offer; nor did they raise any protest when the days grew into weeks and months. These were halcyon days for the world-weary man--delightful days of sketching in the open air in an environment of natural beauty; peaceful evenings spent with his simple-minded hosts and friends; and, happiest of all, the hours in which he basked in the smiles and blushes of pretty Sarah Hoggins, carrying home her pails of milk, helping her to churn the b.u.t.ter, or telling to her wondering ears stories of the great world outside her ken, while the sunset steeped the orchard trees above their heads in glory.

To Sarah he was known as "Mr Jones"; and to her innocent mind it never occurred that he could be other than the painter he professed to be.

The villagers, however, were sceptical. True, the stranger was a pleasant man who always gave them a cheery "good-day," and gossiped with them in the friendliest manner. But that there was some mystery connected with him, all agreed. "Painter chaps" were notoriously poor, and this man always seemed to have plenty of money to fling about. Then, he would disappear periodically, and always returned with more money.

Where did he go, and how did he get his gold? There could be little doubt about it. This handsome, mysterious, pleasant-tongued stranger must be a highwayman; for it was a fact that every time he was absent, a coach or a chaise was held up in the neighbourhood and its occupants relieved of their valuables.

Suspicion became certainty when Mr Jones bought a piece of land in their village and began to build the finest house in the whole district, a house which must cost, in their bucolic view, a "mint o' money." But Mr Jones simply smiled at their suspicions, and made himself more agreeable than ever. He loved the farmer's daughter, and she made no concealment of her love for him, and nothing else mattered. He had won his "beggar-maid," and happiness was at last within his grasp.

When he asked his hosts for the hand of their daughter in marriage, the good lady was indignant. "Marry Sarah!" she exclaimed. "What, to a fine gentleman? No, indeed; no happiness can come from such a marriage!"

But the farmer for once put his foot down. "Yes," he said, "he shall marry her. The la.s.s loves him dearly; and has he not house and land, too, and plenty of money to keep her?" And thus it came to pa.s.s that one October day the church-bells of Bolas rang a merry peal; the villagers put on their gala clothes; and, amid general rejoicing, qualified by not a few dark hints and forebodings, Sarah Hoggins was led to the rustic altar by her "highwayman" bridegroom.

For two ideally happy years Mr Jones lived with his humble bride in the fine new house which he had built for her, and which he called Burleigh Villa. He had lived down his character of highwayman, and was regarded, and respected, as the most important man in the village. He was even appointed to the honourable offices of churchwarden and overseer; while under his tuition his peasant-wife was becoming, in the words of the village gossips, "quite the lady."

One day towards the end of December, 1793, after two years of this idyllic life, Mr Jones chanced to read in a country paper news which he had dreaded, for it meant a revolution in his life, the return to the world he had so gladly forsaken. His dream of the simple life, of peaceful days, was at an end. His uncle, the old Earl, was dead, and the coronet and large estates had devolved on him. Should he refuse to take them, and end his days in this idyllic obscurity, or should he claim the "baubles," and return to the hollow splendour of a life on which he had turned his back?

The struggle between duty and inclination was long and bitter; but in the end duty carried the day. He would go to "Burghley House by Stamford Town," and fill his place on the roll of the Earls of Exeter. To his wife he merely said: "To-morrow we must start on a journey to Lincolnshire. Business calls me there, and we will go together," a proposal to which she gladly consented, for it meant that she would see something of the great outside world with the husband she loved.

At daybreak next morning "Mr Jones" said good-bye to his kind hosts and relatives and to the scene of so much peaceful happiness, and, mounting his wife behind him on a pillion, started on the journey to distant Lincolnshire. Through Cannock Chase, by Lichfield and Leicester, they rode, finding hospitality at many a great house on the way, rather to the dismay of Sarah, who would have preferred the accommodation of some modest inn, and who marvelled not a little that her husband, the obscure artist, should be known to and welcomed by such great folk. But was he not her hero, one of "Nature's gentlemen," and as such the equal of any man in the land?

At last, after days of happy journeying through the cold December days, they came within view of a stately mansion placed in a lordly park, at sight of which Sarah exclaimed, with sparkling eyes, "Oh, what a beautiful house!" "Yes," answered her husband, reining in his horse to enjoy the view; "it is a lovely place. How would you like, my dear Sally, to be its mistress?" Sally broke into a merry peal of laughter.

"Only fancy _me_," she said, "mistress of such a n.o.ble house! It's too funny for words. But how I should love it if we were only rich enough to live in it!" "I am so glad you like it, darling," answered her husband, as he turned in the saddle and placed an arm around her waist; "for it is yours. I am the Earl of Exeter, its owner, and you--well, you are my Countess--and my Queen."

"'Now welcome, Lady!' exclaimed the Earl-- 'This Castle is thine, and these dark woods all.'

She believed him wild, but his words were truth, For Ellen is Lady of Rosenthal."

He did not, like the hero of Moore's ballad, "blow his horn with a lordly air"; but with his Countess he presented himself at the door of Burleigh to receive the homage and welcome due to its lord.

"Many a gallant gay domestic Bow before him at the door; And they speak in gentle murmur When they answer to his call, While he treads with footsteps firmer Leading on from hall to hall.

And while now she wanders blindly, Nor the meaning can divine, Proudly turns he round and kindly, 'All of that is mine and thine.'"

Thus did Sarah Hoggins, the peasant-girl, blossom into a Countess, chatelaine of three lordly pleasure-houses, and Lady Bountiful to an army of dependents. The news of the romantic story flashed through the county, indeed through the whole of England; and great lords and ladies by the score flocked to Burleigh to welcome and pay homage to its heroine.

For a few too brief years Countess Sarah was happy in her new and splendid environment, though it is said she often sighed for the dear dead days when her husband was a landscape painter, and she his humble bride in their village home. The modest primrose did not bear well the transplanting to the lordly hot-house. Her cheeks began to lose their roses. She bore to her husband three children; and then, "like a lily drooping, she bowed down her head and died," tenderly and lovingly nursed to the last breath by the husband whose heart, it is said, died with her.

Of her two sons, the elder succeeded to his father's Earldom, and was promoted to a Marquisate. The younger, Lord Thomas Cecil, married a daughter of the fourth Duke of Richmond--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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 accomplishments found immediate favour and rapid promotion. He was dubbed a knight when most youths of his years were still wrestling with their Latin Grammar; he was appointed for life Master of the Buckhounds; and was chosen one of the six gilded youths who ministered to the King in the Privy Chamber. And in love he was as precocious as at the Royal Court and in mental and manly accomplishments, for at eighteen we find him standing at the altar in the King's Palace at Sheen, near Richmond, with his youthful Sovereign as best man.

Whether it was really a love-match or not is open to doubt, perhaps; for Robert Dudley seems to have had little voice in the choice of his bride. For his elder brother, Guildford, the Duke chose a wife of exalted rank, none other than the Lady Jane Grey, grand-daughter of Louis XII.'s Queen and Henry VIII.'s sister. But for his boy, Robert, a plain knight's daughter seems to have been good enough in his eyes; and she was Amy, child of Sir John Robsart, of Siderstern, a lady whose fate was to be as full of pathos and tragedy as that of his brother Guildford's wife.

For a time, however, Fortune seemed to smile on this union of the Duke's son and the Knight's daughter, who was as fair as she was to be unfortunate, and who was not without a goodly dower of Norfolk lands, on which her youthful husband settled for a few years of peaceful life. He soon became a man of mark in the county of his adoption, taking the lead in local affairs, administering his estates with skill, and finally blossoming into a Member of Parliament to represent his neighbours at Westminster. But the call of Court life was always in his ears; and many a long spell he stole from his wife and his rural duties to spend among the gaieties of Whitehall or the splendours of Henri II.'s French _entourage_.

With the death of the boy-king, Edward VI., a change tragic and unexpected came in the young knight's life. His ambitious father coveted a crown for his daughter-in-law, the Lady Jane Grey, whom he had induced Edward, on his death-bed, to nominate as his successor; and Northumberland, thus armed with Royal authority and spurred by his insatiable ambition, sought by force of arms to give effect to his scheme almost before the breath had left the late Sovereign's body. How his daring project failed is well-known history--how the Princess Mary on her way southward to her throne eluded Robert Dudley, who was sent to intercept her; how she equally outwitted Northumberland and his army, and made her triumphant entry into London as Queen; and how her vengeance fell on those who had sought to s.n.a.t.c.h the crown from her.

From the Duke and Lady Jane to Robert Dudley, all the traitors who had conspired to do this dastardly deed were sent to cool their misguided ardour in the Tower, from which Northumberland, Jane and her husband were led to the headsman's block; while Robert Dudley was among those who were left to languish in durance, and to while away the tedious hours of captivity by carving their emblems and names on the walls of their cells, where they may be seen to this day, or to stroll disconsolately on the Tower leads by way of melancholy exercise.

Robert, it is said, found many of these hours of duress far from unpleasant; for among the prisoners in the Tower was none other than the Princess Elizabeth, sister to the Queen (and her successor on the throne); and we are told, on what authority does not appear, that there were many sweet and stolen meetings between the fair young Princess and the captive knight, when bribed warders turned a blind eye on their dallying. And rumour even goes so far as to speak of secret nuptials, the fruits of which were, in late years, to bear such high names as my Lord of Ess.e.x and Francis Bacon.

"Fairy tales," no doubt; but, stripped of such ornamental embellishment, there can be little doubt that it was within the Tower's grim walls that Dudley first learnt to love the lady who was to be his Queen, and in whose life he was destined to play such a romantic part, when she should wear her crown, and he should be her avowed lover and aspirant to her hand.

A year of such pleasantly-qualified captivity, and Robert Dudley was a free man again, sent to purge his treason, by a Queen, indulgent to his youth and it may be to his good looks, by wielding a sword in the war then raging between Spain and France; and here he acquitted himself so valiantly for Mary's Spanish allies that, on his return in 1558, covered with glory, the ban on the Dudleys was removed; and Robert and his brothers and sisters were restored to all the rank and rights their father's treason had forfeited.

A few months later Queen Mary died; and when Elizabeth ascended the throne, Dudley's sun burst into splendour. The romance which had been cradled amidst the fearful joys of prison-meetings, was now to flourish under vastly-changed conditions. That the new Queen had lost her heart to the handsome and accomplished cavalier, whose prowess in war had set the seal on the favour won by his graces of person and mind and his ingratiating charm, there can be small doubt; and as little that Dudley, forgetful of the wife left to pine in solitude in her Norfolk home, returned the devotion of the lady, now his Sovereign, who had made his Tower prison a palace of delight.

Nor did Elizabeth make any concealment of her pa.s.sion. She was a Queen; and none should question her right to smile on any man, be he subject or king. Before she had been a year on the Throne, Dudley was proudly wearing the coveted Garter; was a Privy Councillor and Master of Her Majesty's horse. She gave him fat lands and monasteries to add to the large possessions with which her brother Edward had endowed his favourite; and wherever she went on her Royal progresses, Robert Dudley rode gallantly at her right hand, a King in all but name. And no Queen ever had more splendid escort.

He was, indeed, a man after her own heart, the _beau ideal_ of a cavalier; a lover, like herself, of pomp and splendour, a past-master of the arts of pageantry and pleasure, and the owner of a tongue as skilled in the language of adroit flattery as in the use of honeyed words. Such was Robert Dudley who loved his Queen; and such the Queen who returned undisguised admiration for flattery, and love for love.

That the greatest Kings and Princes of Europe sought the young Queen's hand; that amba.s.sadors tumbled over each other in their eagerness to press on her this splendid alliance and that, mattered nothing to her.

Her hand was her own as much as her Crown--she would dispose of it as she wished, and none should say her nay. To the fears and anger of her people at the prospect of her alliance with a subject she was as indifferent as to the jealousies of Dudley's Court rivals. She could afford to smile at them all--and she did.

And, while Dudley was thus basking in the smiles of his Sovereign, the Lady Amy was eating her heart out in loneliness and a futile jealousy in Norfolk. Her husband, it is true, paid her a duty visit now and then, and kept her purse well supplied for dresses she had not the heart to wear. She knew she had lost his love, if, indeed, she had ever had it; and she spent her days, as was known too late, in tears and prayers for deliverance from a burden she was too weary to bear longer.

One day, in September 1560, an ominous rumour began to take voice.

Dudley's wife had been poisoned--by her husband, it was said with bated breath. The Queen herself heard, and repeated the report to the Spanish Amba.s.sador; varying it on the following day by the statement that "Lord Robert's wife had broken her neck. It appears that she fell down a staircase." And this amended version proved to be tragically true. While Dudley was dallying with his Queen amid the splendours of the Court, his devoted wife was found, with her neck broken, lying at the foot of a staircase in the house of a Norfolk neighbour, whose guest she was.

How had this tragedy happened? and had Dudley any hand in it? were the questions that pa.s.sed fear-fully from mouth to mouth, from end to end of England. The story, as told at the inquest, throws little light on what must always remain more or less a mystery.

This story was as simple as it was tragic. It seems that Amy Robsart (for by her maiden name she will always live in memory and in pity) rose early on Sunday morning, the 8th of September, the day of her death, and suggested that the entire household at c.u.mnor Place, at which she was staying, should leave her alone and spend the day at a neighbouring fair at Abingdon. "As for me," she said, "I shall be quite happy alone. I have no taste for pleasure; but I always like to know that others are enjoying themselves, even if I cannot." Eagerly responsive to such a welcome suggestion the entire household repaired to the fair, except the hostess (Mrs Owen) and a lady guest; and with them as companions Amy Robsart spent a quiet and peaceful day. During the evening she rose suddenly from the card-table, at which the three ladies were playing, and left the room; and nothing more was seen of her until the servants returning from the fair found her dead body at the stair-foot.

Was it suicide or a brutal murder? The bucolic jury shrank from either conclusion, and gave as their verdict "accidental death." That Amy Robsart ended her own life is far from improbable; for it was no secret to her friends that she was weary of it, and would welcome the release death alone could bring. But the general opinion, so far from supporting this plausible theory, turned to thoughts of murder, and branded Dudley as slayer of his wife. It was even commonly whispered that he had bribed one of his minions, Anthony Foster, to hurl her down the stairs to her death.

Whatever may be 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 pa.s.sion 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--canva.s.sing 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 amba.s.sadors, to interview ministers, and to sit in her seat at the deliberations of her council. To such an eminence had the favour of a Queen raised the grandson of the "country squire."

No wonder it was commonly rumoured either that she was actually Dudley's wife or that her relations with him were open to grave suspicion. "I am spoken of," she once bitterly said to the Spanish Amba.s.sador, "as if I were an immodest woman. I ought not to wonder at it. I have favoured him because of his excellent disposition and his many merits. But I am young, and he is young, and therefore we have been slandered. G.o.d knows, they do us grievous wrong, and the time will come when the world knows it also. I do not live in a corner; a thousand eyes see all I do, and calumny will not fasten on me for ever."

But neither Elizabeth nor Dudley (or Leicester, as we must now call him) allowed these rumours and suspicions to affect even their familiarities, which were proclaimed to all on many a public occasion; as when the Earl once, during a heated game of tennis, s.n.a.t.c.hed the Queen's handkerchief from her hand and proceeded to wipe his perspiring forehead with it.