and was so highly prized in the good opinion of the Queen, that she thought the court deficient without him: And whereas (through the fame of his deserts) he was in the election for the kingdom of Pole, she refused to further his advancement, not out of emulation, but out of fear to lose the jewel of her times.* He married the daughter and sole heir of Sir Francis Walsingham, then secretary of state, a lady destinated to the bed of honour, who (after his deplorable death at Zutphen, in the Netherlands, where he was governor of Vitishing, at the time of his uncle's being there) was married to my Lord of Essex, and since his death, to my Lord of Saint Albons, all persons of the sword, and otherwise of great honour and virtue.

They have a very quaint and factious. figment of him, that Mars and Mercury fell at variance whose servant he should

*See Memoirs of the Sidneys, p. 104, and Wood's Athena Oxon. Vol. I. p. 226.

be: And there is an epigrammist that saith, that Art and Nature had spent their excellencies in his fashioning; and fearing they should not end what they begun, they bestowed him on Fortune, and Nature stood musing, and amazed to behold her own work. But these are the petulancies of poets.

Certain it is, he was a noble and matchless gentleman; and it may be justly said, without hyperboles of fiction, as it was of Cato Uticensis, that he seemed to be born to that only which he went about ;-versatilis ingenii, as Plutarch hath it; but to speak more of him, were to take him less.

SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM.

Sir Francis Walsingham, as we have said, had the honour to be Sir Philip Sidney's father-in-law. He was a gentleman, at first, of a good house, but of a better education, and from the university travelled for the rest of his learning. He was doubtless the best linguist of the times; but knew best how to use his own tongue, whereby he came to be employed in the chiefest affairs of state. He was sent ambassador into France, and stayed there a lieger long, in the heat of the civil wars, and at the same time that Monsieur was here a suitor to the Queen; and, if I be not mistaken, he played the very same part there, as since Gundamore did here. At his return, he was taken principal secretary, and was one of the great engines of state, and of the times, high in the Queen's favour, and a

watchful servant over the safety of his mistress.

They note him to have had certain curiosities, and secret ways of intelligence above the rest; but I must confess I am to seek wherefore he suffered Parry to play so long on the hook, before he hoisted him up; and I have been a little curious in the search thereof, though I have not to do with the arcana imperii. *

For to know is sometimes a burden; and I remember that it was Ovid's crimen aut error, that he saw too much. But I hope these are collaterals of no danger: but that Parry intending to kill the Queen, made

* William Parry, doctor of laws, a bigotted Papist. He pretended to reveal to the Queen and her ministers the plots which had been formed against her by Morgan and other fugitive Catholics. For this purpose he obtained repeated access to the Queen's person, harbouring all the while, as he himself confessed, the purpose of assassinating her. His treason was discovered by the confession of Edmund Neville, his accomplice ; although Parry was not immediately secured, but suffered, as Naunton expresses it, to play on the hook for some time afterward.

the way of his access by betraying of others, and impeaching of the priests of his own correspondency, and thereby had access and conference with the Queen, and also oftentimes familiar and private conference with Walsingham, will not be the query of the mystery; for the secretary might have had end of discovery on a further maturity of the treason, but that after the Queen knew Parry's intent, why she should then admit him to private discourse, and Walsingham to suffer it, considering the condition of all assailings, and permit him to go where and whither he listed, and only on the security of a dark centinel set over him, was a piece of reach and hazard beyond my apprehension.

I must again profess, that having read many of his letters, for they are commonly sent to my Lord of Leicester and Burleigh out of France, containing many fine passages and secrets, yet if I might have been beholding to his ciphers, whereof they are

P