It is not for me to defend Dudley against the suggestions of being privy to the assassination of his wife, any more than to defend him from the accusation of having been the cause of the deaths of many others as charged against him in "Leicester's Commonwealth." Here, among others, Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, Lord Sheffield, and Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, are said to have been poisoned by him; but rumours of poisoning were at that time prevalent, and it was suggested he had endeavoured to make away by poison with his wife Amy, in order to be free to marry Queen Elizabeth; one writer has within the last few years gone so far as to charge Elizabeth with complicity. She was certainly of a jealous disposition, for when Leicester eventually married the widow of the Earl of Essex, he narrowly escaped imprisonment in the tower, and was actually banished from the court; similarly when Raleigh dared to marry, he being forty and Elizabeth fifty-nine, he was sent to the tower to cool his ardour. Mr. Rye, who is confident Amy Robsart was murdered, and Elizabeth privy to the fact, says, "By some, Anne Boleyn is made out to be an innocent woman, who, with her brother, was judicially murdered by her husband, to make room for Jane Seymour, whom he married the day after her execution. If this view is right, Elizabeth was daughter of an atrocious murderer. But if as Mr. Froude believes, Anne Boleyn was guilty of the crimes attributed to her, then Elizabeth was the daughter of the vilest and most abandoned woman of her age. There is no third course. Elizabeth must have been, on one side or the other, the daughter of an abominable parent, male or female as you please, and the inheritor of as bad blood as might be. But I contend it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Elizabeth knew that her rival's murder was being contemplated, and did not desire to prevent it, in which case she was an accessary before the fact, or that she must after the event have guessed, for she was no fool, that murder had been done to facilitate Leicester's plans, in which case she was in effect, an accessary after the fact."