The Countess of Suffolk was, of course, an object of considerable attention. This lady was the second wife of the Chancellor, and was equally celebrated for her beauty and her rapacity. At the time of her marriage with the Earl of Suffolk she was a widow, having been united to the eldest son of Lord Rich. Her birth was not noble, but she had inherited a portion of the estate of her father, Sir Henry Knevit, a Wiltshire Knight. The Countess acquired a great ascendancy over her husband, and there is too much reason to suppose that he succumbed to the influence of her talents and her beauty, and, although he did not share in the fruits of her peculation, permitted her to indulge her avarice. So notorious were the bribes of which this lady accepted, that Lord Bacon compared her to an exchange woman who kept a shop, in which Sir John Bingley exclaimed “What do ye lack?” At length the small-pox destroyed the beauty which had been so fatal to the Countess’s peace and honour, and which had wrought much misery and disgrace to all who yielded to its influence. But if the career of this busy female courtier were reprehensible, that of her young and beautiful daughter, the Countess of Somerset, who accompanied her mother that day, was tinged with guilt of a far deeper dye. It is difficult, in modern times, to realise to one’s mind two such women—the one availing herself of her high station and her personal attractions to enrich her family at the expense of every delicate sentiment and lofty principle; the other infuriated by a mad passion, until every womanly attribute departed, and the vengeance of a fiend alone characterised her dark career. The Countess of Somerset was, at this time, still in the bloom of her youth, being about twenty-four years of age, and the crimes which afterwards brought infamy and retribution on her, were then known only to her corrupt and remorseless heart. The Court, to use the expression of a contemporary historian, “was her nest, and she was hatched up by her mother, whom the sour breath of the age had already tainted, from whom the young lady might take such a tincture, that ease, greatness, and Court glories would more disdain and impress on her, than any way wear out and diminish.” Such was the loveliness of this guilty woman, that those who saw her face might, it has been said, “challenge nature for harbouring so wicked a heart under so sweet and bewitching a countenance:”[67] nor were the arts fashionable at the time forgotten; they heightened the attractions of the Countess of Somerset. “All outward adornments,” we are told, “to present beauty in her full glory, were not wanting;” among the rest, yellow starch, “the invention and foyl of jaundiced complexions, with great cut-work bands and piccadillies,” were adopted by the unhappy Lady Somerset, and were, doubtless, produced on this, as upon other festive occasions. Footnote 67: Wilson’s Reign of James I., p. 63.