[86] I.e. a permanent one such as Hampton Court affords to some.
[87] "About"?
[88] Either by the Queen herself, whose touchiness is well known, or by jealous and mischief-making fellow courtiers.
[89] "Sharing."
[90] "Is grudged."
[91] We should say "try."
GEORGE CLIFFORD EARL OF CUMBERLAND
(1558-1605)
This not very fortunate or wholly blameless but very remarkable and representative person was the third holder of the earldom and the sixteenth of the famous barony of Clifford. He was great-grandson of Wordsworth's "Shepherd Lord"; father of Anne Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery (pupil of Daniel the poet and a typical great lady of her time); one of the foremost of Elizabeth's privateering courtiers; one of the chief victims of her caprice and parsimony; a magnificent noble, but a great spendthrift, something of a libertine, never unkindly but hardly ever wise. This remarkable deathbed letter (the giving of which depended on the kindness of Dr. G. C. Williamson of Hampstead, author of the Life and Voyages of G. Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, Cambridge University Press, 1920, in which it appeared, p. 270-1), pretty well explains itself. "Sweet Meg," his wife, was Lady Margaret Russell, daughter of the Earl of Bedford. The pair were on very affectionate terms for many years: but had latterly been estranged by certain infidelities on the Earl's part and by money disputes and difficulties, so that when his last illness attacked him Lady Cumberland was not with him. She was not, however, proof against this repentant appeal: but returned with her daughter. Both were present at his death in the Savoy soon after he wrote. He had made, personally or by deputy, ten if not twelve voyages against the Spaniards, and though there was a good deal of mismanagement about them he took Porto Rico in one; captured, but made little profit out of, an enormously valuable prize, the Madre de Dios, in another; gave the warning which enabled Lord Thomas Howard to escape, but which Sir Richard Grenville refused to take "at Flores, in the Azores"; and built at his own expense, the largest privateer then or perhaps ever constructed, the Malice Scourge—for the remarkable subsequent history of which, see Mr. David Hannay's article, "The Saga of a Ship," in Blackwood, May, 1921.