Not far from the ferry, in Berkshire, is the ancient manor-house of Cumnor Hall, sacred to the melancholy memory of poor Amy Robsart. She was the wife of Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and when his ambition led him to seek Queen Elizabeth's hand it was necessary to get her out of the way. So he sent Amy to Cumnor, where his servant Anthony Forster lived. At first poison was tried, but she suspected it, and would not take the potion. Then, sending all the people away, Sir Richard Varney and Forster, with another man, strangled her, and afterwards threw her down stairs, breaking her neck. It was at first given out that poor Amy had fallen by accident and killed herself, but people began to suspect differently, and the third party to the murder, being arrested for a felony and threatening to tell, was privately made away with in prison by Leicester's orders. Both Varney and Forster became melancholy before their deaths, and finally a kinswoman of the earl, on her dying bed, told the whole story. The earl had Amy buried with great pomp at Oxford, but it is recorded that the chaplain by accident "tripped once or twice in his speech by recommending to their memories that virtuous lady so pitifully _murdered_, instead of saying pitifully _slain_." Sir Walter Scott has woven her sad yet romantic story into his tale of _Kenilworth_; and to prove how ambition overleaps itself, we find Lord Burghley, among other reasons which he urged upon the queen why she should not marry Leicester, saying that "he is infamed by the murder of his wife." The queen remained a virgin sovereign, and Leicester's crime availed only to blacken his character. FAIR ROSAMOND.