8 Testimonial were probably concocted about this time for the purpose of persuading the Pope that his marriage with Alicia Leigh was vitiated by a precontract to Frances Vavassor. The truth was beginning to be known, and his marriage at Lyons might have been pronounced irregular. As matter of fact, Dudley was a convert who might be useful to the Church, and it was therefore not too particular to inquire into the worth of his excuses. If fidelity to one woman is any palliation of lack of faith to another, then Dudley might plead his faith to Elizabeth Southwell as an extenuating circumstance. Their honour rooted in dishonour stood, but to but to one another they were unimpeachably loyal till death parted them after many years. If Dudley was bound to stand well with the Pope, it was also absolutely necessary for him to find a "potent prince whom he could serve with acceptance. The Grand Dukes of Tuscany offered themselves to him as natural patrons. The Medici of his day-Cosmo, and after him Ferdinand-were not like their successors, princes who merely reigned and hunted. They governed and they improved. It was the peculiar good fortune of Sir Robert that the Grand Dukes were intent on developing the commerce of their dominions by creating a good port at Leghorn, and on defending their subjects against the Turks and the Barbary pirates. They had even a dis position to take some share in trade with America. A gentleman who had made one seavoyage, had seen some service at sea, who had an intelligent interest in shipbuilding, and, in what was then regarded as a part of naval science, the fortification of ports, might hope to be employed by them. That he was of noble descent would be all to his advantage. Even if his birth was illegitimate, it was not adulterine, for his father was unmarried and his mother a widow. mother a widow. Dudley betook himself to Florence and presented the Grand Duke with a long and very flourishing account of his life and capacity. It is in French, for he had still, strangely enough, no knowledge of Italian. Whether the Grand Duke believed every word Dudley said to him must be doubtful. He certainly believed a good part, for he took this handsome and interesting exile into his service, and gave him house, land, and pensions. Dudley was a conspicuous person in Tuscany till his death in 1649. The extent of his services is not quite so clear to me as it is to his English biographers. Italian writers do not allow him all the credit his countrymen would give him for the construction of the port and fortifications of Leghorn and the draining of the marshes of Pisa. I must confess to a certain suspicion that he owed no small part of the interest shown him by the Medici to the fact that he was supposed to have suffered for the Church, and to the kindness of the ladies of the Grand Ducal family to him, to Elizabeth Southwell, and their twelve children. The best, if not the only, evidence we possess as to his practical faculty, are his invention of the "Warwick powders," a concoction which looks to the unscientific eye a horrible quack medicine; the proposal for a warship which he sent to Henry, Prince of Wales; and the colossal Arcano del Mare. It is not lawful for a mere ignorant layman to speak of the medicine. As for the ship and the "Arcano" they are better within my reach. They leave on me the impression that Sir Robert was one of those renaissance men who combined a glowing ambition to do things on a great scale, with a lively imagination and much speculative ingenuity. The "gallizabra," as he called the vessel he proposed to Prince Henry, has much the look of one of those attempts to combine incompatible advantages which fascinate the inventor of more fancy than solid mechanical faculty. She was to have been of shallow draft, but high freeboard, and to have carried a heavy armament of guns of onethird less weight than the pieces then in use, but of equal calibre, strength, and range. She was to have been equally good to sail and to row. The whole draft is full of descriptions of things to be done, and of assurances that the writer can can do them if he is given an opportunity. To me it seems that the gallizabra would have been of very unstable stability, and that even if she did not turn turtle she would have gone to leeward in a good breeze, and would have drifted hopelessly in the channel currents. It is to be noted that one of the vessels he built for the Grand Duke proved unmanageable, and that he had to excuse himself by throwing the blame on the builder. Yet he did build ships which rendered good service. Sir The "Secret of the Sea" is a book to be approached with respect. In the threevolume edition of 1646-47 it is handsome, and the twovolume edition of 1661 is colossal in proportions. Both editions are full of fine copperplate maps and pictures of instruments. As for the text, it appears to me to possess the one merit we would expect to find in the work of a man of comprehensive foreseeing imagination. Robert was for doing all things largely and on a compacted plan. His is the first (I think it may safely be said the actual first) scheme for constructing a navy in classes of ships on uniform scales. He had in his mind the germs of the "line of battle" and its dependent services of frigates and sloops. His navigation does not go beyond what he had learnt from Davis and his own instructor Abraham Kendall. Nor could it well have gone further. All the world had known, at any rate since Gemma Frisius had written, that it would be easy to find the longitude if only you could carry with you a trustworthy timekeeper. Till Harrison con or no progress could be made. Galileo might have forestalled Harrison, but Sir Robert, a brilliant amateur of many interests, was not the man to bury himself in the long and patient labour needed for such a task. structed his chronometer little teot him from his wife whose jointure was charged on his lands? He could make peace with her only by renouncing Elizabeth Southwell, and to do that would have touched his honour too closely - and his love. If he went back it must be as a favourite and above the law. The work he did for the Grand Duke did not absorb him wholly. He was engaged for years in attempts to procure his recall home on tolerable terms. When summoned back by King James on pain of forfeiture, he refused to come, and justified his refusal in a long letter of engaging impudence and exquisite unreason. He said that he could not see why he was to be blamed for marrying Elizabeth Southwell, when the Earl of Devonshire had just married Penelope Rich, though her husband Lord Rich was still alive. When we consider that Penelope had at any rate been separated regularly a thoro et mensa, though not a vinculo, that Devonshire was not 8 married man, and that the King had driven them both from Court, Sir Robert's plea looks more than desperate. Perhaps he was not quite serious. It was unthinkable that he could return as a mere penitent. His estates were encumbered by his father's debts. He had raised every penny he could when he went abroad. He would be subject to fine as a recusant if he returned. The King might abstain from levying them, and might save him from the punishment for felony. But who was to pro The device he imagined for securing his recall on, to him, tolerable terms, is a very excellent example of how easy it is for a clever man to lose all sense of reality and to speculate "in a balloon." In 1612 he drew up a pamphlet to show King James how to bridle the "insolencies" of his Parliament. It was the simplest thing in the world; all the King had to do was to raise a body of troops, garrison the principal towns, disarm the whole population, and levy taxes in the intelligent way pointed out to him by Sir Robert. What the people of England were to be at while his scheme was being carried out, the exile at Florence did not condescend to consider. He forgot "the stomach of that people." The egregious proposal was sent to Sir David Fowlis to be laid before the King. What the King said about it when, if ever, he did see it, is not recorded. We may safely assume that King Jamie sent the man who brought "the illfangled platform" away with "a flea in his lug." It drifted into the possession of Sir Robert Cotton, who, being a collector of books and manuscripts, would of course collect any curiosity. If Dudley had a disinterested taste for causing mischief, he must have watched the course honours of his father and uncle of the torpedo he had launched to the higher honours of his into English politics with keen grandfather, who had been amusement. In 1628 the dis- attainted and beheaded by honest Secretary of Sir Robert Mary Tudor, and that honour Cotton, who is said to have he held by a good right within been his natural son (for "the the Imperial Dominions. He gods are just, and of our wore it for the rest of his life pleasant vices make whips to and left it to his son and the Scourge us with "), gave a grandson with whom the main copy to the Parliamentary line of the Dudleys ended in leaders, of whom Wentworth Italy. If he was not Duke of was then one. They made Northumberland at home, he vigorous use of it, and poor was undeniably Duca di NorCotton saw his beloved library tombria in Italy. sequestered for a space, and was reduced from a plump, well-favoured gentleman to mere skin and bone by grief. Nor was that all, for when Wentworth had become Strafford, and the evil days were upon him, the copy of the pamphlet was found among his papers, and was produced as being his work. If the proposal did harm to others it did not help Dudley. Perhaps on the contrary it only made King James more ready to grant the Earldom of Leicester to the Sydneys, and of Warwick to Lord Rich in 1618. The door was shut in Dudley's face, and shut with insult. He had used both titles in Italy, and this was a kind of branding as an impostor. The answer he made was thoroughly worthy of him. If they were to be ducks, he would be drake. The Grand Duchess was a sister of the Emperor Ferdinand, and was much his friend and patroness. With her help he persuaded the Emperor not to create him, but to recognise him as Duke of Northumberland. He went over the lesser He would have been well pleased to take a more practical revenge, and therefore he applied to the Pope to grant him letters of reprisal against English commerce in the Mediterranean. They were granted him, with the limitation that he must not attack Roman Catholics. I do not find that the Pope's letters of marque were put to practical use. Duca di Nortombria had to force the opposition of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who was by no means desirous of seeing English commerce frightened away from Leghorn, and who may have remembered that the King of England possessed a navy. Yet, Il Duca did not fail altogether of his revenge. Whether he threatened to become a nuisance, or because friends in England took pity on his case, he did in the end receive some compensation for his forfeited lands. In his later years he was in sufficiently easy circumstances to be able to marry four of his daughters into noble families, which implies that he could dower them. He built himself a house in Florence, lived turiera.' She He died at the Villa Castello, granted to him by Grand Duke Cosmo, having survived Elizabeth Southwell for eighteen years. The male line of his family became extinct with the death of his grandson, but the energy of the Dudleys did not leave itself without a witness in Italy. His granddaughter, Christina Marquesa Paleotti, was a lady of admired beauty and of many ups and downs in life. Her history has been written by Signor Corrado Ricci in Una illustre avven married one daughter among the proud Colonnas by a miracle of resolute diplomacy. Another daughter became the first Duchess of Shrewsbury. Her son Ferdinand also went to England, and in due course— that is to say, on the 28th March 1718-attained to the gallows at Tyburn for the murder of his servant Giovanni Niccoló. Family pride was strong in Ferdinand to the last. He insisted that he should be hanged well above the other criminals on whom justice took place on that day. His great-grandfather would probably have made the same demand in the same circumstances. DAVID HANNAY. |