In the meanwhile Dudley and Pickering were manœuvring for the position of first English candidate. Sir William had now a fine suite of rooms in the palace, and was ruffling bravely, giving grand entertainments, and dining in solitary state by himself, with minstrels playing in the gallery, rather than feast, like the other courtiers of his rank, at one of the tables of the household. He pooh-poohed Ravenstein and his mission and said that the Queen would laugh at him and all the rest of them, as he knew she meant to die a maid. Pickering appears to have rather lost his head with his new grandeur, and soon drops out of the scene, upon which only the keenest wits could hope to survive. His insolence had aroused the indignation of the greater nobles, but somehow it was only the least pugnacious of them with whom he quarrelled. The Earl of Bedford, who from all accounts seems to have been a misshapen monstrosity with an enormous head, said something offensive about Pickering at a banquet, and a challenge from the irate knight was the immediate result; Dudley, of all men, being the bearer thereof, always at this time ready to wound the extreme Protestant party, to which Bedford belonged. But Pickering was as distasteful to Catholics as to Protestants. On one occasion he was about to enter the private chapel inside the Queen’s apartments at Whitehall, when he was met at the door by the Earl of Arundel, who told him he ought to know that that was no place for him, but was reserved for the lords of the Council. Pickering answered that he knew that very well, and he also knew that Arundel was an impudent knave. The Earl was no hero, and Pickering went swaggering about the Court for days telling the story. With such a swashbuckler as this for a rival, it is not surprising that the handsome and youthful Dudley rapidly passed him in the race for his mistress’s favour. Dudley played his game cleverly. His idea was first to put all English aspirants out of the running by ostensibly favouring the match with the Archduke, whilst he himself was strengthening his influence over the Queen, in the certainty that, when matters of religion came to be discussed, difficulties might be raised at any moment which would break off the Austrian negotiations. In the meanwhile the Queen coquetted with dull-witted Ravenstein, and persuaded him that if the Archduke would come over and she liked him, she would marry him, although she warned the ambassador not to give his master the trouble of coming so far to see so ugly a lady as she was. Instead of paying her the compliment for which she was angling, he maladroitly asked her whether she wished him to write that to the Archduke. “Certainly not,” she replied, “on my account, for I have no intention of marrying.” She jeered at Ferdinand and his devotions, but displayed a discreet maidenly interest in Charles, and, it is easy to see, promptly extracted from Ravenstein all the knowledge he