But she could no longer hold back, and the Netherlands were asking that one to whom they could look as a leader be sent to them, one whom they could follow as they had followed their own William of Orange. This was the man who had put himself at the head of the Protestant Party and was, as the world knew, so beloved of the Queen that she would never set him at the head of an enterprise to which she would not give her wholehearted support.

The Netherlands were crying out for Leicester.

And so she gave her consent that he should go.

As she bade him a fond farewell, she thought how handsome he was, how full of enthusiasm and ambition. He appeared to be almost a young man again.

He did not suffer at the parting as she did. He was going in search of honor and that military glory which had always appealed to him.

She must stay behind, following his exploits through dispatches and letters, rejoicing in one fact only: if he were separated from her, he was also separated from his wife.

Robert rode in state through the clean little towns to the sound of rapturous applause. It was as though a lifelong ambition was at last realized. For so many years he had longed to be a King; and these people cheered him, knelt before him, as though he were more than a King—their savior.

It was shortly after his arrival at the Hague that the greatest honor of his life was paid to him.

It was New Year’s morning, and he was dressing in his chamber when a delegation arrived to see him. Without waiting to finish his dressing he went to the antechamber. There the leader of the delegation knelt and told him that Dutchmen, looking upon him as their leader, wished to offer him all those titles which had belonged to the Prince of Orange. He should be Governor, ruler, Stadholder.

Robert was overwhelmed with delight. He had longed all his life for something like this: his own kingdom to rule, a kingdom he owed, not to the good graces of the Queen, but to his own statesmanship and popularity.

This was the great testing time of Robert’s life; and how was he to know that, when honors came easily, the hands did not grow strong enough to hold them, that it was by hard work and achievement only that such strength came? He had been carried up to greatness in a litter prepared for him by a doting woman; when he reached the top the air was too rarified for him without his litter to support him; and these Hollanders were asking him to stand on his own feet. Philip of Spain was close; the Duke of Parma was waiting; and in England there was the Queen, who must give her consent to his acceptance of such honors.

He hesitated. He wanted to accept, to take his laurels. He longed to ride through the streets and receive the people’s homage. Dare he do so, and later persuade the Queen to support him? It was an irritating shock to realize that he could not maintain his position without that support.

He hesitated and succumbed to temptation.

He was the Governor of the Netherlands now. He was to be Stadholder, and the people called him Excellency.

The news came to England.

Lettice, seeing herself as the Queen of the Netherlands, decided to join her husband in his new kingdom.

Great preparations were made. Lettice would travel in state to the Hague, with all the trappings of a Queen.

Elizabeth, furious because he had dared accept his new position without even consulting her, was writing angry letters to him. He should at once renounce what he had dared to take up.

“How contemptuously we conceive ourselves to have been used by you, you shall by this bearer understand. We could not have imagined had we not seen it come to pass, that a man raised up by ourself, and extraordinarily favored by us above any other subject in the land, would have so contemptuously broken our commandment …”

While she was writing, Kat came to tell her of the preparations Lettice was making to join her husband.

Elizabeth laid down her pen.

“She may prepare all she will,” she sneered. “She shall never go.”

“She plans to go in the state of a Queen, surpassing even Your Majesty’s state.”

Elizabeth’s eyes blazed. “Let the she-wolf make her plans. She shall ere long wish she had not joined herself to a man whom I shall bring so low as I shall this one. This is the end of the kindness I have shown my lord of Leicester. That man, I promise you, shall wish he had never been born. As for that harlot, that she-wolf, we shall soon see her deserting him. He will see who his friends are. Does he think she has been faithful to him while he has been away?”

“I know, Your Majesty, there are rumors of that most handsome Christopher Blount.”

“Years younger than she is!” snapped the Queen. “A friend of her son’s. There is pleasant news for my lord! But I shall make him smart more than she ever can!”

She picked up her pen and wrote, commanding him to lay aside his newfound honors. He would make an open and public resignation in the very place where he had accepted absolute government without his Queen’s consent. He would show himself to his new “people” as a man of no account, a man unable to make a decision without the consent of his mistress—and most firmly she withheld that consent.

“Fail you not,” she ended, “as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.”

Then she laid aside her pen and let her anger blaze, while she thought with furious resentment of the wicked woman who had dared betray him with a younger man.

Robert, in desperation, sent home two men to plead his cause with the Queen. The matter was too far gone for open withdrawal he pointed out. If she repudiated him, the people of the Netherlands would lose heart; and she must think what that would mean to England. He was contrite; he had offended her and he would rather have died than have done that. But for the good of England, she must give him time to slip out gracefully from his terrible blunder; she must see that public repudiation would be playing into the hands of Philip of Spain.

Her ministers agreed with that view. Robert had to be allowed to disentangle himself with as much tact as possible.

She was now in turn outraged mistress and apprehensive Queen. Worried by the state of affairs in the Netherlands, fervently she wished that England had not become so involved. She accused Robert of squandering England’s money. To that accusation he made a magnificent gesture by selling his own lands and giving up a great part of his fortune to the campaign in the Netherlands.

But he was not suited to his task. He had been too long favored, and had never learned to win success through tedious application. His experience of war was limited. He could sense approaching that military disaster, which lack of the Queen’s support must mean.

His greatest source of consolation was his nephew, Philip Sidney, who was there with him.

He dearly loved Philip and trusted him completely. Philip had urged him not to send for Lettice, and Philip was proved right; for Robert, knowing Elizabeth, realized that the real cause of her anger was the fact that Lettice had arrogantly prepared to join him with the state of a Queen.

Philip had sent one of his players, who had accompanied them to Holland, with urgent messages to Walsingham—Philip’s father-in-law—asking him to use all his influence to prevent Lettice making the journey.

Unfortunately the player had been a head-in-the-clouds fellow—a young man named Will, an actor from Stratford-on-Avon—and, said Philip, recalling the way in which this actor had performed his mission, it would have been a better thing if he had stayed in Stratford; for he had delivered the letters to Lettice herself instead of to Walsingham, and thereby much trouble had been caused which might have been avoided.

Robert was beginning to hate the Netherlands; he was longing for nothing so much as to return home. He wished he had never thought of leaving England and had not been tempted lightly to take that which had been offered.

His melancholy turned to bitter grief when, after the battle of Zutphen, in which he himself fought valiantly, the dead were brought in and he found among them the body of his nephew.

He listened to the accounts of how nobly Philip Sidney had died. This gallant young man had given part of his armor to another man, although he knew himself to be in need of it. When Philip had been fainting from wounds a cup of water had been put to his lips by one of his men; but Philip, seeing a soldier close by groaning in agony, had sent his man over to the sufferer that the water might be given to one who was in greater need of it than he himself. Robert was proud of his nephew, but he felt that he would have given everything that was left to him if he might have brought him back to life.

So Robert lived through his gloomiest hour. He felt in that moment that death would have been preferable to the plight in which he found himself.

When Robert was suffering in the Netherlands, news of the Babington Conspiracy swept through England. Babington, a young man fascinated by the charm of the Queen of Scots when he had been a page in her household, had been persuaded by a group of men to communicate with the Queen with a view to effecting the assassination of Elizabeth and the setting of Mary upon the throne.

Mary had lost none of her impetuosity during the years and, to her, plotting was an exciting pastime.

The conspirators had forgotten what elaborate spy-systems had been set in motion by the alert Walsingham.

Walsingham understood what was happening in the early stages of the plot, for a priest, Gilbert Gifford, having been sent to England secretly to work against Protestantism with the help of the great Catholic families, was captured. Walsingham promised to spare his life if he would become his spy.