voyages held a foremost place

is dubious testimony. It purports to be a copy of Letters Testimonial sworn before a notary public on the 30th November 1592 by Thomas Jobson and Thomas Combley. But in November 1592 Frances Vavassor had been married for a year to the eldest of the remarkable Sherley brothers. Jobson and Combley were men who sailed with Dudley to the West Indies in 1594-and the copy was produced in Italy when he had good reason for trying to prove that he was not well and truly married when he left England in 1604. Lying and the concoction of false documents were not held to be incompatible with the character of the complete Elizabethan gentleman. Robert Dudley was not more scrupulous than others, on his own showing. In October 1591 a news-letter writer, whose letter is preserved at Hatfield, could report that "Mr Dudley was forbidden the Court for kissing Mistress Candishe in the presence, being his wife as is said." Who was deceived here? That Dudley married a sister or cousin (for there is a doubt which she was) of the circumnavigator Thomas Cavendish or Candishe, is matter of record. If he had precontracted himself to Frances Vavassor and was thereby debarred from marrying another woman, it follows that he inherited more from Leicester than lands and leases.

Maritime adventure and speculation in privateering

bethans. Dudley needed no further stimulus to turn his mind to them than that which he could have breathed in the air of the Court and the City. But if any one man more than another drew him to what was to be a guiding influence of his life, that man was Thomas Cavendish. The circumnavigator had spent the booty brought back from his voyage in 1588 like a sailor. He was soon planning another venture for the wealth of the Spaniard in the South Seas. His own money had been scattered profusely. The second venture, in which he died miserably enough in 1592, was fitted out by the help of loans. Dudley was apparently the chief creditor, for he took out letters of administration

of Cavendish's estate, and and the two ships which came back from the failure were handed over to him by the Council. He would have been poor-spirited indeed if the fate of his friend had deterred him from trying his fortune on the sea. The memory of Cavendish's first success was sure to overbear the more recent proof that the gold which glittered in the South Seas was surrounded by protecting dangers. Many were straining for the prize. In 1593 Richard Hawkins sailed on the voyage which ended disastrously in the Bay of San Mateo. Dudley was preparing to follow him, but was forbidden by the Queen to go to the South Seas. Yet he had her leave to sail else

where, and in 1594 he preceded Raleigh to Trinidad and the Spanish Main.

The voyage does not rank among the great adventures of the Elizabethan age. He himself, though not disposed to underrate his own achievements, thought but little of it. He even dismissed it in the laconio account he gave to Hakluyt as being one of those things so commonly done as not to be worth mention. If the others were like his, we can understand why Sir William Monson said that most voyages to the West Indies proved unprofitable. Dudley and his three ships did not meet with disaster, but they found nobody to fight and no prizes of value to take. Captain Wyatt, who commanded his main body of pikes, and who wrote a much longer account, is loud in praise of his noble young commander. But there were few Spaniards in Trinidad, and they were poor. On the Main the settlements were even smaller. Wages, time, and health wore away, and nothing was done because there was nothing to do except to take formal possession of Trinidad. This Dudley did, and perhaps that is why we possess a rather badblooded reference to him in one of Raleigh's letters to Robert Cecil. His prior claim might have proved to be a bone in Sir Walter's throat. On the way home Sir Robert had a set-to with a "Biskayner," whom he could not take, but whom he was glad to think he left in a sinking state. We do not possess the "Biskayner's"

version of the story. It might give a different colour to the encounter. Captain Wyatt is our witness that Dudley displayed high spirit in the affair. On his return he spoke of himself cheerfully in a letter to Robert Cecil as a "plain sailor," and he continued to send out ships on ventures which it is to be feared did not prove more profitable than this had been.

Dudley was now home again, none the richer for his cruise. Yet he had played the man, and had won his place among the gentlemen who were fit to be employed in the wars. He took his share and won his knighthood in the expedition to Cadiz in 1595, and was in the unsuccessful attempt to save Calais from the Spaniards. That share was not so considerable as he was tempted to picture it in later life, but he was there in a creditable way. He also earned the Queen's bounty for building a ship of force. His wife had died before 1596, and in that year he married Alicia Leigh, daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh, a Warwickshire neighbour. A Mr Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh had been one of the Warwickshire gentlemen ordered by the Council in 1590 to protect Dudley against the forcible entry of Sir Christopher Blount and the Countess of Leicester. Seven daughters, of whom four grew up, were born of that marriage before Sir Robert violated it by his own act in 1605. In the last days of the Queen there was a possibility that it might have

been cut short by the headsman's axe. Sir Robert was by instinct one of the martial men who swarmed round his commander in the Cadiz expedition, the Earl of Essex. That Essex was the son of his old enemy, the Countess Lettice, who, as he was soon to endeavour to prove, had helped to wrong his mother grossly, and had undoubtedly tried to deprive him of Kenilworth, would have been no reason why he should not join the Earl in his foolish adventure. By luck or some other cause Sir Robert's connection with Essex brought him nothing worse than a brief confinement in the Tower, and he escaped mounting the scaffold with Christopher Blount. That within four years he was an exile for the rest of his life was not due to participation in political conspiracies. He fled the country, and his wife, after failing to prove the legitimacy of his birth, but perhaps because he had fallen in love, wholeheartedly, for the first time.

The legitimacy case of Sir Robert Dudley is one of these conglomerations of hard-swearing, contradictions, pathos, and irrelevancies which are irresistible to the solver of mysteries. As the Star Chamber of evil memory intervened roughly, and imposed silence on the parties, there has always been a plausible excuse for alleging that injustice was done. Injustice there would have been -to the Countess of Leicester -if Sir Robert had succeeded. The Star Chamber is entitled to reasonable fair-play, and in

this case common-sense, which will not be blinded by sentiment and suppositions, has to allow that it was right in its judgment. It showed itself polite when it excused Sir Robert's action on the ground that he had been misled by one Drury, of unsavoury reputation. Drury, a "Knight of the Post "-i.e., professional false witness and sharper had escaped the Council's claws by a well-timed natural death. Persons of more consequence than Drury had egged Sir Robert on, if he needed egging. It would, in view of what was about to happen, be rash to conclude that his wife had any influence on him, but she appears, from many indications, to have been a gentlewoman with a great deal of proper pride, who would much rather have been Countess of Leicester and of Warwick than plain Dame Alicia Dudley. Her family

would certainly have preferred to see her wearing the more exalted titles. When Dudley began his attempt to prove his legitimacy in May 1603, he was at his father inlaw's house, Stoneleigh. The straightforward course would have been to apply to the House of Lords. But Dudley took an indirect way. He applied for a commission to examine witnesses from the Court of Audience at Canterbury, and then in September he brought a flamingly collusive action in the Consistory Court at Lichfield against one Buswell for calling him bastard. These proceedings could not be

concealed from the Countess Lettice. They aimed at nothing less than reducing her from wife to mistress, and thereby stripping her of her jointure. It was a matter of course that she would defend herself, and Sir Robert's friends were very negligent if they did not remind him that the mother of the Earl of Essex would be sure of the good will of King James. They and he apparently forgot this essential fact. They were rewarded by learning that the Star Chamber had descended upon them. If anybody is to be pitied at this point of the case, then our sympathies ought to go to Sir Robert's mother, now and for many years past the wife of Sir Edward Stafford. The poor lady was put in a most ignominious dilemma. She must either confess that she had not been married to Leicester, or that she committed bigamy when she married Sir Edward Stafford. The Dudleys appear to have ignored the existence of Sir Edward, who was still alive. He died in 1604, but he had time to make a deposition, which is certainly entitled to as much credit as any other statement made in the case. It was to the effect that after his marriage Queen Elizabeth made him "importune his weif whether theare were a contracte betweene her and the Erle of Leicester, which if it were, then she would make him make upp her honour with marriage or rot in the Tower, and would better the estate of Stafforde.

She

answered with greate vowes, greif, and passion that she had trusted the said Earle too much to have anything to show to constraine him to marry her. The like she did to the Queene, and the like to the Erle of Sussex; and that she had tould Stafford the trueth before she married him." It is only too plain that she did not tell the truth in 1603, when she said she had been secretly married to Leicester at Sheen. If she had, she would not have sworn that the marriage was promoted by her cousin, the Duke of Norfolk, whose head had been taken off nearly a year before! The Star Chamber may very properly have been impressed by the fact that Lady Stafford did not pretend that her brother the Admiral, now Earl of Nottingham, had been told of her marriage in 1573. Yet he was her natural supporter, and one finds it difficult to believe that if she had insisted on marriage, the gentleman who commanded against the Armada would have done less for her than old Sir Francis Knollys did for his daughter the Countess of Essex. Sir Francis had taken care that there should be no doubt in her case. On one side was probability and such evidence as was available; on the other were improbability, contradictions, defects of evidence, and some pretty manifest perjury. At a much later date, in 1644, Charles I. was persuaded to grant the title of Duchess Dudley to Lady Dudley. The patent contains a very odd confession that King James

had been misled and that Dudley had had hard measure. But in 1644 King Charles was not at leisure to give his mind to the examination of the story. The Solicitor General who drew the patent, Holbourne, was Lady Dudley's son-inlaw, and then Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, who held one of the titles Sir Robert Dudley claimed, was Admiral who commanded for the Parliament. In 1605, when the Star Chamber gave its judgment, it could not have decided otherwise than it did that Dudley's claim was unfounded. The papers were impounded and sealed, and the parties were forbidden to move further in the matter.

the

A sober-minded man would now have settled down to make the best of what was after all a very tolerable position. By accepting defeat and applying himself to render good service to the King, he might have persuaded James, who was amenable to attentions, to create him Earl of Leicester or of Warwick. But then, if he had been a sober-minded man that is the course he would have taken from the beginning. And he was an Elizabethan of the stamp of the Sherley brothers, and many more,-a man who must be playing a part, and that no commonplace one. In June of 1605 he applied for a licence to tra vel abroad-and went, accompanied by Mistress Elizabeth Southwell, his cousin, a maid of honour, and one of the most beautiful women in England in the dress of page.

The elopement of Mistress Southwell caused no small commotion. Orders were given, too late, to close the ports. The Governor of Calais was begged as a favour to arrest the lady and send her back. He did arrest her, but Mistress Southwell held the common faith of her generation-that all lies told to deceive an enemy are pardonable. She assured the Governor that she had escaped from heretic England in order to be free to enter a convent. He could not oppose so pious an intention, and the lady was allowed to go with Dudley to Lyons. Both avowed themselves Roman Catholics, and at Lyons they were married.

Dudley had now put what had all the appearance of being impassable barriers between himself and his country. His perversion had subjected him to the penal laws, and the recently passed Act of James I. had made it felony to commit bigamy. The King's pardon could cover a great deal, but it could not rid him of his wife Alicia, or of her legal claims on him. And then the pardon must be earned. Dudley looked about for a refuge. Italy fascinated the men of his time, and it had now become his natural abiding-place. A convert of his position was best placed near the Pope. It is true that he had given the Holy Father some cause for offence. He had applied for a dispensation to marry his cousin, but he had not confessed that he had left a wife behind. The ambiguous Letters