As a general, Leicester was a notorious failure; in statecraft, a bungler; as a man, he was a transgressor of every law, human and divine; as a conqueror of women’s hearts, he had no peer in his day, and we cannot withhold from him this pitiful meed of honor—if honor it be—when we read that “his most sorrowful wife Lætitia, through a sense of conjugal love and fidelity, hath put up this monument to the best and dearest of husbands.”
“By Jove!” said Dux, again.
“She ought to speak well of him!” retorted Caput. “He murdered her first husband, and repudiated his second wife Douglas Howard (Lady Sheffield) in order to espouse Lettice, not to mention the fact that he had tried ineffectually about the time of the Kenilworth fête, to rid himself of No. 2 by poison. He was a hero of determined measures. Witness the trifling episode of Amy Robsart to which the Earl is indebted for our visit to-day.”
We stood our ground in calm disdain of the thrust; were not to be diverted from our steadfast contemplation of the King of Hearts. That his superb physique was not overpraised by contemporaries, the yellow marble bears satisfactory evidence, yet the chief charm of his face was said to be his eyes. The forehead is lofty; the head nobly-shaped; the nose aquiline; the mouth, even under the heavy moustache, was, we could see, feminine in mould and sweetness. His hands, joined in death, as they seldom were in life, in mute prayer upon his breast, are of patrician beauty. He is clad in full armor, and wears the orders bestowed upon him by his royal and doating mistress. He was sadly out of favor with her at the time of his death in 1588. She survived him fifteen years. If she had turned aside in one of her famous “progresses” to look upon this altar-tomb, would she have smiled, sobbed or sworn upon reading that his third countess had written him down a model Benedict? His sorrowful Lætitia dragged on the load of life for forty-six years after her Leicester’s decease, and now lies by his side also with uplifted praying hands. She is a prim matron, richly bedight “with ruff and cuff and farthingales and things.” The chaste contour and placidity of her features confuse us as to her identity with the “light o’ love” who winked at the murder that made her the wife of Lady Douglas Howard’s husband. The exemplary couple are encompassed by a high and handsomely wrought iron fence; canopied by a sort of temple-front supported by four Corinthian pillars. It is almost unnecessary to remark that the ubiquitous Bear and Ragged Staff mounts guard above this. A few yards away is the statue of a pretty little boy, well-grown for his three years; his chubby cheeks encircled by a lace-frilled cap; an embroidered vestment reaching to his feet. He lies like father and mother, prone on his back, upon a flat tombstone.
“The noble Impe Robert of Dudley,” reads the inscription, with a list of other titles too numerous and ponderous to be jotted down or recollected. The only legitimate son of Amy’s, Douglas’, Elizabeth’s, Lettice’s—Every-woman’s Leicester, and because he stood in the way of the succession of some forgotten uncle or cousin, poisoned to order, by his nurse! “The pity of it!” says First thought at the sight of the innocent baby-face. Second thought—“How well for himself and his kind that his father’s and mother’s son did not mature into manhood!”
Leicester left another boy, the son of Lady Douglas, whom he cast off after she refused to die of the poison that “left her bald.” Warwickshire traditions are rife with stories of her and her child who also bore his father’s name. Miss Strickland adverts to one, still repeated by the gossips of Old Warwick, in which the disowned wife, with disheveled hair and streaming tears, rocks young Robert in her arms, crooning the ballad we mothers have often sung without dreaming of its plaintive origin:—
“Balow my baby, lie still and sleep!
It grieves me sair to see thee weep.”
To this Robert his father bequeathed Kenilworth and its estates in the same will that denied his legitimacy. The heir assumed the title of Earl of Warwick, but “the crown”—alias, Elizabeth—laid claim to and repossessed herself of castle and lands.
Thus, the Hospital is the sole remaining “relict” of the man who turned Queen Bess’s wits out of doors, and while her madness lasted, procured for himself the titles and honors set in array in the Latin epitaph upon his monument.