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After poor Lady Catherine took Lady Loe into her confidence, she made frantic application for help to Lord Robert Dudley—not yet Earl of Leicester—so high in the Queen’s good graces. In this there is sheer drama as well as pathos—this confession and piteous appeal from the young and comely lady of quality, whose only fault was that she had married for love, to the handsome, pampered, arrogant cavalier, the Queen’s darling. Lady Hertford went to his very chamber in Court to implore him to stand between her parlous state as prospective mother and the Queen’s anger. Yet nothing in such contingencies could divert Elizabeth’s fury, or make her act in a humane fashion. Lord Hertford was summoned to England to undergo trial with his wife, and very soon both were committed separately to the Tower. But before this could be done the farce of a public enquiry had to be played. A commission was ordained, pompously headed by no less a person than Archbishop Parker. The accused were requested to produce, within a given time, witnesses of their marriage. That they failed to do this is extraordinary. The priest seems to have disappeared, and Lady Jane Seymour appeared unable to find him or to assist in furnishing the required evidence. But as this couple could not satisfy the Commission in time they were sentenced to be imprisoned during the Queen’s pleasure. “Displeasure” would be the correct word. For Elizabeth knew little but vanity and vexation of spirit at this period. The very word marriage must have been a red rag to her. With the strong vitality and virility of her father warring within her against the heritage of the feminine instincts of her mother, Anne Boleyn, with countless suitors and innumerable flatterers to encourage and keep at bay alternately, with one eye fixed on Mary of Scotland and another on the “devildoms of Spain,” her life just now was a constant turmoil. Her whole entourage was forced to share in it. She would not decide upon a consort to help her; she belittled the estate of marriage one day and dallied with it the next. No wonder that poor Mr. Treasurer Cecil wrote as he did on the eve of the New Year of 1564. Schemes matrimonial whirled round him like the winter snow. Elizabeth was being wooed by a French monarch and an Austrian Emperor at the same moment; the Lennox family and Mary of Scotland were working to achieve the marriage of the latter with Darnley, and the Lady Mary Grey, fired no doubt by her sister’s intrigue and sick of loneliness, had actually surreptitiously married John Keys, the Serjeant Porter to the Queen. Meanwhile the Earl and Countess of Hertford were in the Tower. In addition, the Queen was putting up her beloved Dudley, now Earl of Leicester, to oppose Darnley as a possible consort for Scottish Mary. Shrewd old Cecil shows, however, that she is only half-hearted about it: “I see the qn Mty very desyroos to have my L. of Lecester placed in this high degree to be the Scottish Queen’s husband, but whan it commeth to the conditions which are demanded I see her then remiss of her earnestness.”[7]