The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck: A Scandal of the XVIIth Century

Table of

s a matter

ealt in by a

I., I.,

ing to live with him, had taken his part, now that he had been dismissed from office, that she had solicited his cause at the very Council table,[11] and that she had quarrelled with both the King and

year 1617. Sir Edward and Lady Elizabeth went to law ab

Lord Danvers" (her maternal grandfather), "the Lord Denny" (her brother-in-law), "Sir Thomas Howard" (her nephew, afterwards first Earl of Berkshire) "& his lady, with I know not how many more, & declaimed bitterly against him, and so carried herself that divers said Burbage" [the celebrated actor

wyers of the day, Lady Elizabeth was not at all afraid of pitting herself against

nds; & his curst heart hath been forced to yield more than ever he meant; but upon this agreement he flatters himself that she will prove a very goo

him, Coke also was plotting. He discovered that Bacon, who had been made Lord Keeper early in the year 1617, had had his head turned by his promotion and had become g

of doing that Earl a service. Now, Buckingham had an elder brother, Sir John Villiers, who was very poor, and for whom he was anxious to pick up an heiress. The happy thought struck Coke that, as all his wife's property was entailed on her daughter, Frances, he might secure Buckingham's support by selling the girl to

mation. Misled by this idea of his own importance, he was imprudent enough to treat his colleague, Winwood, the Secretary of State, with as little ceremony as if he had been a junior clerk, the

d to be over head and ears in love with her, and observed that "although he would have been well pleased to have taken her in her smoke [smock], he should be glad, by way of curiosity, to know ho

oke that possibly the time had arrived for informing, first his wife

ich she had constantly stung him. But all this had been mere child's play in comparison with her fury on being informed that, without so much as consulting her, her husband had definitely settled a match for her only child with a portionless knight. A new weapon was lying ready to her hand, and she made every possible use of it. It consisted in the fact that, much as she and her husband had quarrelled and lived apart, she

lored her parents never again to mention the question of her marrying him. The mother and daughter were on one side and the fathe

"a very managing woman." Since the death of Buckingham's father, she had had two husbands, Sir William Rayner and Sir Thomas Compton,[13] brother to the Earl of Northampton. She was in high favour at Court, and she was created Countess of Bu

acon the Lord Keeper, Lord and Lady Burghley, Lord Danvers, Lord D

d some little distance to a coach, which she had engaged to be in waiting for them at an appointed place. In this coach they travelled by unfrequented and circuitous roads, until they arrived at a house near Oatlands, a place belonging to the Earl of Argyll, but rented at that time by Lady Elizabeth's cousin, Sir Edmund Withipole. The distance from Holborn to Oatlands, as the crow flies, is about twenty miles; but, by the roundabo

the place of their retreat from becoming known. And great caution was necessary, for Lady Elizabeth and Frances were almost within a dozen m

young Henry de Vere, eighteenth Earl of Oxford. Although to a lesser extent, like Sir John Villiers, he was impecunious and on the look out for an heiress, his father-who was distinguished for having been one of the peers appointed to sit in judgmen

daughter to believe that Oxford was in love with her, she "showed her a forged letter, purporting to come from that nobleman, which asseverated that he was deeply attac

TNO

in a letter date

Campbell (Vol. I., p. 297); but

rovocations, Bird "wrought so upon his cold temper, that Compton sent him a challenge." On receiving it, Bird told Compton's second that he would only accept the challenge on condition that the duel should take place in a saw-pit, "Where he might be sure Compton could not run away from him