all his murders and poisonings, was himself poisoned by that which was prepared for others, (some say by his wife at Cornbury Lodge before mentioned,) though Baker in his Chronicle would have it at Killingworth, anno 1588.”[1]
The same accusation has been adopted and circulated by the author of Leicester’s Commonwealth, a satire written directly against the Earl of Leicester, which loaded him with the most horrid crimes, and, among the rest, with the murder of his first wife. It was alluded to in the Yorkshire Tragedy, a play erroneously ascribed to Shakspeare, where a baker, who determines to destroy all his family, throws his wife down stairs, with this allusion to the supposed murder of Leicester’s lady,—
Is, break her neck—a politician did it.
The reader will find I have borrowed seve-
- ↑ Ashmole’s Antiquities of Berkshire, vol. i. p. 149. The tradition as to Leicester’s death was thus communicated by Ben Jonson to Drummond of Hawthornden:—“The Earl of Leicester gave a bottle of liquor to his Lady, which he willed her to use in any faintness, which she, after his returne from court, not knowing it was poison, gave him, and so he died.”—Ben Jonson’s Information to Drummond of Hawthornden, MS.—Sir Robert Siebald’s Copy.
