dominant favorite for so many years, was aroused, and he began to fear that the affections of the queen had really been won for either the agent or the principal. To render the former, if not both, odious, Leceister spread a report that Simier had gained an ascendant over her majesty, not by natural means, but by incantations and love-potions. In revenge for this libel, the object of it communicated to the queen, what none had hitherto dared to disclose to her, that Leicester had committed no less heinous an iniquity than that of having married, without his sovereign's knowledge, the widow of the Earl of Essex. This was touching Elizabeth on her sore, or rather her mad, point. Her fury was awful: she threatened to confine the criminal in the Tower; and why she did not execute her threat, seems now quite inexplicable. The consequnce of this recrimination, on the part of Simier, was such a feud between him and Leicester, that the latter is supposed to have employed an assassin to rid him of his enemy. As soon as the report of this sanguinary intention reached the queen, she issued a proclamation, taking the French minister under her immediate protection; so cleverly had this wily man ingratiated himself with one who had an irresistible affection for all the idlest and emptiest gallantries and levities.
At last, the principal himself arrived in London; and though, as we have stated, he was her favorite aversion, a very ugly man, she assumed towards him such an attitude as could not fail to make him believe that ultimately she would bestow upon him her hand. A rapid succession of balls and courtly festivities ensued; the people were deceived as well as the lover; and a citizen wrote an angry attack on her majesty, entitled "The Gulph in which England will be swallowed by the Frnech marriage." The writer was apprehended, tried, and sentenced to lose his right hand as a libeler: but such was the courage, and such almost the slavish loyalty of the man, that as soon as the sentence had been executed, with his left hand he grasped his hat, waved it round his head, and shouted, "God save the queen!"
Robertson says, "Elizabeth had long amused the French court by carrying on a treaty of marriage with the Duke of Alencon, the king's brother. But whether, at the age of forty-five, she really intended to marry a prince of twenty, whether the pleasure of being flattered and courted made her listen to the addresses of so young a lover, or whether considerations of interest predominated in this as well as in every
