**Spanish Calendar, vol. i. p. iv. Mr. Gairdner says, ‘Major Hume in preparing his first volume, he informs me, took transcripts from Simancas of all the direct English correspondence,’ but for letters between England and Flanders used Mr. Froude’s transcripts. Gairdner, English Historical Review, January 1898, note 1. ***Relations Politiquesdes Pays-Bas et de l’Anqleterre sous le Regne de Philippe II. vol. ii. pp. 529-533. Brussels, 1883. The amateur of truth, being now fully apprised of the ‘hazards’ which add variety to the links of history, turns to the Spanish Calendar for the reports of the ambassadors. He reaches April 18, 1559, when de Feria says: ‘Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs, and it is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night. People talk of this so freely that they go so far as to say that his wife has a malady in one of her breasts and the Queen is only waiting for her to die to marry Lord Robert.’ De Feria therefore suggests that Philip might come to terms with Lord Robert. Again, on April 29, 1559, de Feria writes (according to the Calendar): ‘Sometimes she’ (Elizabeth) ‘appears to want to marry him’ (Archduke Ferdinand) ‘and speaks like a woman who will only accept a great prince, and then they say she is in love with Lord Robert, and never lets him leave her.’ De Feria has reason to believe that ‘she will never bear children’ * Sp. Cal. i. pp. 57, 58, 63; Doc. Ineditos, 87, 171, 180. Mr. Froude combines these two passages in one quotation, putting the second part (of April 29) first, thus: ‘They tell me that she is enamoured of my Lord Robert Dudley, and will never let him leave her side. HE OFFERS ME HIS SERVICES IN BEHALF OF THE ARCH DUKE, BUT I DOUBT WHETHER IT WILL BE WELL TO USE THEM. He is in such favour that people say she visits him in his chamber day and night. Nay, it is even reported that his wife has a cancer on her breast, and that the Queen waits only till she die to marry him.’* *Froude, vi. p. 199. De Feria to Philip, April 28 and April 29. MS. Simancas, cf. Documentos Ineditos, pp. 87, 171, 180, ut supra. The sentence printed in capitals cannot be found by me in either of de Feria’s letters quoted by Mr. Froude, but the sense of it occurs in a letter written at another date. Mr. Froude has placed, in his quotation, first a sentence of the letter of April 29, then a sentence not in either letter (as far as the Calendar and printed Spanish documents show), then sentences from the letter of April 18. He goes on to remark that the marriage of Amy and Dudley ‘was a love match of a doubtful kind,’ about which we have, as has been shown, no information whatever. Such are the pitfalls which strew the path of inquiry. One thing is plain, a year and a half before her death Amy was regarded as a person who would be ‘better dead,’ and Elizabeth was said to love Dudley, on whom she showered honours and gifts.