His grief, however, seems to have been short-lived; for before the unhappy Amy had been many months in her grave we find him more ardent than ever in his devotion to Elizabeth, whose hand he was now free to claim. But the Queen, who was nothing if not an arrant coquette, was in no mood to be caught even by the man she loved. She drove him to distraction by her caprices. One moment she would "rap him on the knuckles," only to smile her sweetest on him the next. One day she would flaunt in his face a patent of peerage, as evidence of her affection; the next she would cut the parchment to pieces under his nose, laughing the while. She roused him to frenzies of jealousy by dallying with one Royal offer of marriage after another--now it was Philip, the Spanish King, now His Majesty of Sweden--canvassing their respective merits and charms in his presence, and flaring into angry retorts when he ventured to ridicule his august rivals. She carried her tortures even to the extent of seeming to encourage a match between her favourite and Mary Queen of Scots; and, to make him a worthy suitor for a Royal hand, granted him the peerage she had so long dangled before him. Robert Dudley as Baron Denbigh and Earl of Leicester was no unfit husband for her "Royal sister"; certainly a much more possible personage than "Sir Robert" could have been. But she never intended thus to lose her most acceptable admirer, and was relieved--though she affected to be angry--when news came that Mary had chosen Darnley for her husband. Thus was Leicester's loss Elizabeth's gain; and his reward was that he took still a higher place in her favour. If he was not now King Consort in name, he was, at least, in place and power. When the Queen fancied she was dying of small-pox she announced her wish that he should be appointed Protector of the Realm at a princely salary; and, when she recovered, he was empowered to act as her deputy--to receive ambassadors, to interview ministers, and to sit in her seat at the deliberations of her council. To such an eminence had the favour of a Queen raised the grandson of the "country squire." No wonder it was commonly rumoured either that she was actually Dudley's wife or that her relations with him were open to grave suspicion. "I am spoken of," she once bitterly said to the Spanish Ambassador, "as if I were an immodest woman. I ought not to wonder at it. I have favoured him because of his excellent disposition and his many merits. But I am young, and he is young, and therefore we have been slandered. God knows, they do us grievous wrong, and the time will come when the world knows it also. I do not live in a corner; a thousand eyes see all I do, and calumny will not fasten on me for ever."