Before Blount arrived at Cumnor on September 10, the coroner’s jury had been chosen, sensible men, but some of them hostile to Forster. By September 12 (NOT 27) Dudley had retired from Court and was at Kew, but had received Blount’s letter. He bade Blount tell the jury to inquire faithfully and find an honest verdict. On the thirteenth Blount again wrote from Cumnor, meaning to join Dudley next day: ‘I I have ALMOST NOTHING that can make me so much [as?] to think that any man can be the doer of it... the circumstances and the many things which I can learn doth persuade me that only misfortune hath done it and nothing else.’ There is another letter by Dudley from Windsor, without date. He has had a reassuring letter from Smythe, foreman of the jury. He wishes them to examine ‘as long as they lawfully may,’ and that a fresh jury should try the case again. He wishes Sir Richard Blount to help. Appleyard and Arthur Robsart have been present. He means to have no more dealings with the jury; his only ‘dealings’ seem to have been his repeated requests that they would be diligent and honest. ‘I am right glad they be all strangers to me.’* *Pettigrew, pp. 28-32. These letters are wholly inconsistent with guilt, in the faintest degree, on the side of Dudley. But people were not satisfied. There is a letter to Cecil, of September 17, from Lever, a minister at Coventry, saying that the country was full of mutterings and dangerous suspicions, and that there must be earnest searching and trying of the truth.* *Burghley Papers, Haynes, 362.