57 
rather a good saying of De Feria, with whom he was dining, and 
who had been Ambassador in London. The Queen was always 
trimming her sails to please now Philip, now the French King; 
says De Feria: “Commend me to your Queen, and bid her look 
to herself, and remember the Spanish proverb, ‘The Cock may 
scrape in the Dunghill till he uncovers the knife to cut his own 
throat.’” Writing to Cecil on January 15th, 1560, in view of 
certain difficulties, he says in his own energetic vein, “Trust we 
none but God and ourselves, For if I were God I would swear by 
myself that I believe our trust is in God’s defence only and by 
Him in our foresight, so our professed enemies and faint friends 
instead of cartells of defiance will send us solemn letters of con- 
gratulations otherwise Ve Victis.” How powerfully does this 
remind us of an utterance of another energetic spirit, Cromwell— 
“ Trust in God and keep your powder dry.” 
Probably it was soon after this time that Chaloner returned from 
his embassy, and it was shortly after this, I conjecture, that he 
married, as his second wife, Etheldreda daughter of Edward 
Frodsham of Elton, Cheshire, by whom he had a son who is also 
called Thomas. I cannot ascertain when he was born, but if we 
admit the accuracy of the date given on his monument at Chiswick, 
it was in 1564; other authorities, perhaps more trustworthy, point 
to 1559. That there was something peculiar about the marriage 
seems certain; for in a note of a letter from Francis Chaloner, 
brother of Sir Thomas, given in the State Papers for 1565, the 
former writes that the latter has been ill of a fever, and has made 
a will leaving his lands to “the bastard ;” but at no other time, 
nor by any other person, has the slander been repeated. That he 
was married about this time is, I think, very probable for another 
reason. On March 26th, 1562, the Earl of Westmerland, the 
unfortunate Charles, last of the noble stem of the Neville race, 
doomed to feed on the crumbs that fell from the Spanish monarch’s 
table, and to linger out his miserable life in penury and ignominy 
after the unsuccessful Rising of the North, wrote to Chaloner 
desiring to become his tenant for his house in Clerkenwell, which 
he had erected for himself on the land formerly belonging to the 
