By the Rev. Canon J. E. Jackson, P.S.A. 49 , 
described, but that her death was directly sanctioned, at any rate 
connived at, by her husband, then Lord Robert Dudley, afterwards 
the celebrated Earl of Leicester. 
I must just refresh your memory with one or two circumstances. 
On the death of King Edward VI., 6th July, 1553, John Dudley, 
first, Earl of Warwick, and then Duke of Northumberland, tried to 
put his own family on the throne by bringing forward: Lady Jane 
Grey, whom he had married to one of his sons, Lord Guilford Dudley. 
Lord Robert Dudley was another of his sons : and Lord Robert was 
not only concerned in that plot, but is generally believed to have 
inherited his father’s ambition, and to have had an eye to the throne 
himself as the husband of Queen Elizabeth. Having this object in 
view he was charged by certain writers with having stopped at 
nothing ; with having contrived poisonings, assassinations, and every 
kind of villainy. “If,” says an author of later times (Dr. Drake) 
“ he was guilty of half of what ‘memoirs’ charge him with, or even 
what foreign historians mention, he must have been master of greater 
cunning than any minister that this nation ever produced, either 
before or since, not only to have defended himself, but to have 
maintained his power and greatness to the last, under such an accumu- 
lation of guilt and envy.” 
Now I am under no sort of obligation, and am in no way con- 
cerned to be the champion of Robert Dudley, the celebrated Earl of 
Leicester, against all comers: and whether other accusations against 
him are true or false, does not come within the range of the present 
paper. It simply deals with some fresh evidence in ove particular 
case, as supplied by certain documents at Longleat, which by the 
Marquis of Bath’s kind permission are now lying on the table, open 
to your inspection.! 
Before we believe any of the stories in circulation against Lord 
Robert Dudley it is only fair to ask, Who were the authors of those 
stories? As a general answer, they were his enemies in politics or 
in religion. This is clear from the fact of so many atrocities being 
raked together and put forth in all the bitterness that language could 
? These will be found printed in the Appendix to this paper. 
VOL. XVII.—NO. XLIX, E 
