Queen of Scots conceived of me for many things.” He continues his letter with an evidently sincere protest of his loyalty and disinterestedness, and the absence in him of any personal feeling against Mary, but declares his determination to do his best, at all costs, to frustrate any attempted injury against his mistress or her realm. Notwithstanding this small cloud, Burghley went again to Buxton in 1577. A somewhat curious letter from Leicester, who went to Buxton before him in June, shows that the Lord Treasurer’s mode of life was not always prudent. Leicester says that he and his brother are benefiting greatly from the water. “We observe our physician’s orders diligently, and find great pleasure both in drinking and bathing in the water. I think it would be good for your Lordship, but not if you do as we hear your Lordship did last time: taking great journeys abroad ten or twelve miles a day, and using liberal diet with company dinners and suppers. We take another way, dining two or three together, having but one dish of meat at most, and taking the air afoot or on horseback moderately.”[401] In July (1577) Burghley started from Theobalds for his Lincolnshire estates, and thence to Buxton. Leicester wrote to him there that the Queen was desirous of receiving a “tun of Buxton water in hogsheads;” but when in due time the water arrived, “her Majesty seemeth not to make any great account of it. And yet she more than twice or thrice commanded me earnestly to write to you for it, and … asked me sundry times whether I had remembered it or not: but it seems her Majesty doth mistrust it will not be of the goodness here it is there; besides, somebody told her there was some bruit of it about, as though her Majesty had had some sore leg. Such like devices made her half angry with me now for sending to you for it.”[402] This hint of her sore leg was enough to make Elizabeth sacrifice a river of Buxton water if necessary. She, like her father before her, really had an issue in one of her legs, and there was no point upon which she was more sensitive. CHAPTER XII 1576-1580