was, however, a lonely house, and, on the day of Amy’s death, her own servants (apparently by her own desire) were absent. And Amy, like Darnley, was found dead on a Sunday night, no man to this day knowing the actual cause of death in either case. *Pettigrew, pp. 19-22. Here it may be well to consider the version of the tragedy as printed, twenty-four years after the event, by the deadly enemies of Lord Robert, now Earl of Leicester. This is the version which, many years later, aided by local tradition, was used in Ashmole’s account in his ‘History and Antiquities of Berkshire,’ while Sir Walter employed Ashmole’s account as the basis of his romance. We find the PRINTED copy of the book usually known as ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ dated 1584, but probably it had been earlier circulated in manuscript copies, of which several exist.* It purports to be a letter written by a M.A. of Cambridge to a friend in London, containing ‘some talk passed of late’ about Leicester. Doubtless it DOES represent the talk against Leicester that had been passing, at home and abroad, ever since 1560. Such talk, after twenty years, could not be accurate. The point of the writer is that Leicester is lucky in the deaths of inconvenient people. Thus, when he was ‘in full hope to marry’ the Queen ‘he did but send his wife aside, to the house of his servant, Forster of Cumnor, by Oxford, where shortly after she had the chance to fall from a pair of stairs, and so to break her neck, but yet without hurting of her hood, that stood upon her head.’ Except for the hood, of which we know nothing, all this is correct. In the next sentence we read: ‘But Sir Richard Verney, who, by commandment, remained with her that day alone, with one man only, and had sent away perforce all her servants from her, to a market two miles off, he, I say, with his man, can tell how she died.’ The man was privily killed in prison, where he lay for another offence, because he ‘offered to publish’ the fact; and Verney, about the same time, died in London, after raving about devils ‘to a gentleman of worship of mine acquaintance.’ ‘The wife also of Bald Buttler, kinsman to my Lord, gave out the whole fact a little before her death.’ *Pettigrew, pp. 9, 10.