He did indeed look quite bad, and I sez soothin’ly—
“Wall, Martin will be for goin’ back before long now. He is gittin’ hungry himself; I heard him say so.”
We didn’t stop to but one more place on our way back to the tarvern where we had dinner, and that wuz to that old horsepital founded by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in 1571. It wuz meant in the first place for one Master and twelve bretheren, the bretheren to be of the Earl’s servants, or his soldiers who had been injured in battle. But now they are appointed from Warwick and Gloucester, and have a comfortable livin’.
It wuz quite likely in Robert to build this horsepital—a old-fashioned-lookin’ place enough in 1895. But sech likely deeds as this couldn’t cover up his black performances.
The chapel is an elegant buildin’, built for a memorial to the great Earl of Warwick, the first in the Norman line, and his elaborate tomb is here.
But it wuz in this chapel where I see the epitaph of which I spoke more formerly. It is over the tomb of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the one Queen Elizabeth thought so much on. There I see the epitaph I despised.
On the tomb are the recumbent figgers of Leicester and his pardner, the Countess Lettice. Probbly about the only time they wuz ever so nigh to each other without quarrellin’, and this epitaph sez, after givin’ all his titles—more’n enough of ’em—
“His most sorrowful wife Letitia, through a sense of conjugal love and fidelity, has put up this monument to the best and dearest of husbands.”
She must have been a fool, for besides his goin’s on with the queen—which would made me as jealous as a dog—a learned writer says—
“According to every appearance of probability, he poisoned his first wife, disowned his second, dishonored his third before he married her, and in order to marry her, murdered her first husband, while his only surviving son was a natural child by Lady Sheffield.”