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“From the Court the 8th of March,

“Your mistress,

“E. Seyntlo.”

The “Aunt Lenecker” (more correctly known as Lynacre) was a Leake and sister of Lady St. Loe’s mother. She seems to have lived for some years with her niece, possibly since her first widowhood.

Nothing very exciting happened to the St. Loe couple in their short married life. When not at Court they paid visits, were entertained, or entertained their own visitors, as scraps of correspondence show. They must have had traffic already with the great family of Talbot—which, besides Sheffield Castle, owned so many large seats in Derby and Nottingham—and both of them naturally held intercourse with “Mr. Secretary Walsingham” and “Mr. Treasurer Cecil.”

When Sir William St. Loe died—tolerably soon, alas!—Bess Hardwick had gone far with her building, social and actual. Her third widowhood found her richer, bolder, better known at Court, and able to play her part in an ever-widening circle of the powerful and prosperous.

Such a lady would naturally make enemies. In 1567 she was slandered by Henry Jackson, an ex-scholar of Merton College, Oxford, the tutor of her children. Instantly the matter went to the Council, and the Council wrote in September to the Archbishop of Canterbury. “Lady St. Loo, widow, having retained as schoolmaster Henry Jackson... is disturbed by scandalous reports raised against her family by him; you are to examine the matter thoroughly and speedily with the assistance of the Solicitor-General Mr. Oseley and Mr. Peter Osborne or other Ecclesiastical Commissioners, that the lady’s good name may be preserved; if he has unjustly defamed her he is to be severely punished,” runs the digest of the draft in the State MS. And immediately upon the conclusion of the examination the Queen herself intervenes on behalf of the lady “who has long served with credit in our Court,” and forthwith she commands the punishment of the wicked clerk: “extreme punishment, corporal or otherwise, openly or private, and that speedily.”