married in 1550, died suddenly at Cumnor in 1560 in consequence, as he alleged, of a fall down stairs. The circumstances attending the death of the unfortunate lady caused at the time strong suspicions that she had been violently removed as an obstacle in the way of her husband's ambitious projects; and certain letters of Dudley which have recently come to light tend decidedly to confirm the suspicion. Dudley now made public pretensions to the hand of his sovereign; and though Elizabeth did not openly countenance his suit, she showed a most indiscreet partiality for him, and by her indecorous conduct seriously compromised her reputation. In 1564 a new favourite, Sir Christopher Hatton, was introduced to the queen; and probably from that cause, combined with some crooked state policy, she proposed a marriage between her old favourite and Mary Queen of Scots, which, however, came to nothing, as ultimately at least she clearly intended. If his influence with her was shaken for a brief space he soon regained his ascendancy; new favours were heaped upon him; he was created Earl of Leicester and Baron Denbigh in 1564, and soon after was elected chancellor of the university of Oxford, which was then in a state of great decay, but was somewhat improved by the zealous efforts of its new chancellor. Leicester's courtship of Elizabeth was carried on for twenty years with great ardour and unwearied assiduity. There can be no doubt that she was deeply enamoured of him; and she repeatedly declared that, if she married at all, he would be the man; but prudence, love of power, and the remonstrances of her wisest counsellors—who detested the favourite—ultimately deterred her from sharing her throne with him. Meanwhile the earl, whose licentiousness was equal to his ambition, was not prevented by his pursuit of the queen from carrying on frequent intrigues with the frailer beauties of her court. It is certain that in 1572 Lady Sheffield bore him a son—the fruit, as she affirmed, of a private marriage, which, however, Leicester denied, and the lady was unable legally to substantiate. She declared that, provoked at her persistence in her claims, he endeavoured to take her off by poison; that she narrowly escaped death with the loss of her hair and nails; and that, terrified by his acts and menaces, she consented to marry Sir Edward Stafford, as the only way to protect her from the vengeance of the earl. At length, in 1578, when the queen seemed to listen favourably to the overtures of the duke of Anjou, Leicester finally abandoned all hope of success in his ambitious suit, and contracted a private marriage with Lettice Knollys, the widowed Lady Essex, of whom he had become enamoured during her husband's lifetime. Lord Essex died suddenly, not without strong suspicions of foul play, which the marriage of Leicester to his widow—only two days after his death—did not tend to dispel. The secret was revealed to Elizabeth by Simier, Anjou's agent, and excited her vehement indignation. Leicester was ordered to confine himself to Greenwich castle while an apartment was preparing for him in the Tower; but the intercession of his generous adversary, the earl of Sussex, saved him from this punishment, and he was soon after pardoned and restored to favour. Not contented with supreme influence in the court, he resolved to try his fortune in the government of the camp, for which he was totally unfitted. In 1585 he took the command of the forces which Elizabeth sent to the assistance of the Low Countries, then engaged in a desperate struggle with Spain. He was offered and accepted the governor-generalship of the United Provinces without consulting the queen, and in defiance of her express injunction. She was thrown into a towering passion when the news of his disobedience reached her, but finally acquiesced in the arrangement. Leicester was ill fitted for this post and he was badly supported by the queen, whose parsimony and caprice crippled his operations, and reduced his troops to a state of great privation. He returned to England in the following November without having effected anything worthy of notice, leaving behind him anarchy, intrigues, suspicion, and well-founded distrust. He found the English queen and court in a state of great perplexity respecting the course which they should pursue with Mary Queen of Scots. Leicester, when consulted, very characteristically recommended that the unhappy prisoner should be privately put to death by poison. He returned to the Low Countries in 1587 with considerable reinforcements, but his whole object was to promote his own selfish purposes. The other English commanders, Wilkes, Norris, and Buckhurst, refused to act with him, and returned to England. Jealousies and misunderstandings arose between him and the States' leaders; and though he repeatedly hazarded his life and lavished his wealth in the cause of the Netherlanders, he could never gain their confidence, and his administration proved a failure. After an absence of five months he was recalled by the queen in the eventful year of 1588. The invasion of the Spanish armada was imminent, yet at this critical moment—though Lord Buckhurst brought serious charges against him at the council-board for misconduct in the Low Countries, and was supported by the States, who were enraged at the misfortunes they had suffered in the campaign of 1587—the queen appointed her worthless favourite lieutenant-general of the troops mustered at Tetbury for the defence of the country. This, however, was the last office intrusted to him. He died suddenly on the 4th September, 1588, at Cornbury in Oxfordshire, while on his journey to Kenilworth. It was generally believed at the time that he had fallen into the snare which he had so often laid for others, and that by a striking retribution, the poisoned cup with which he had removed those who stood in the way of his ambition or his pleasure, was commended to his own lips. Leicester was an accomplished courtier; but his abilities both as a statesman and as a soldier were of a very moderate kind, and he was thoroughly unprincipled, selfish, and unscrupulous. He left a son by Lady Sheffield.—(See Dudley, Sir Robert.) Leicester's widow married Christopher Blount, who perished on the scaffold in the same cause as her son by her first husband, and died in 1634, in her ninety-fourth year.—J. T.
LEICESTER, Thomas William Coke, Earl of, better known as Mr. Coke of Holkham, one of the fathers of modern English agriculture, was born on the 4th of May, 1752. He was the eldest son of Wenman Roberts, who assumed the surname and arms of Coke on succeeding to the estates of his maternal uncle, Thomas Coke, a great-grandson of Sir Edward Coke, the chief-justice, and was raised to the peerage in 1744 as Earl of Leicester and Viscount Coke of Holkham. Mr. Coke was, to quote his own words at the banquet given to him in 1833, "a young man just returned from abroad, no orator, no politician," when his father, who had represented the county of Norfolk, died, and he was called on to come forward as a candidate. He was only induced to stand by the intimation, that if he did not "a tory would come in." "At the mention of a tory coming in, gentlemen," Mr. Coke said on the occasion already referred to, "my blood chilled all over me from head to foot, and I came forward." He was successful, and with little interruption continued to represent Norfolk until 1832. In the same speech he told his auditors that he had not been two months in the house of commons before he was indirectly offered a peerage, an offer confirmed in a letter from the duke of Portland, and which he indignantly rejected, declaring that he would never desert Mr. Fox. To the end of his parliamentary career Mr. Coke remained a consistent whig, voting and occasionally speaking in favour of the policy and measures of the whig party. It was not, however, as a politician, but as an agriculturist, that he became famous. His large property of Holkham in the west of Norfolk contained about thirty thousand acres, and by the life-long exertions of Mr. Coke, "the friend and disciple of Arthur Young," according to M. de Lavergne, it was completely transformed. When Holkham came into Mr. Coke's hands it was occupied by a number of small farmers struggling for a scanty subsistence. Mr. Coke resolved to farm a portion of it himself; the remainder he divided into very large farms, and by offering long leases procured tenants of energy and capital. He introduced new modes of tillage; he reared; he planted. The result was that the rental rose from £2200 to £20,000 per annum. Instead of eight hundred indifferent Norfolk sheep, four thousand of the most perfect breed in England were to be found on the pastures of Holkham. Before it was his the district had been supplied with corn from other parts; in Mr. Coke's hands it became a fine fertile soil, producing some of the best wheat in England. He raised forests where scarcely a blade of grass had grown before. In the later years of his life the annual fall of timber averaged £2700, being more than the whole of the original rental. In 1833 (according to the memoir of him in the Gentleman's Magazine), Mr. Coke, with his wife and four sons, were on board a vessel launched at Wells which had been built of oak produced from acorns planted by himself. Last not least, the population of Holkham, only one hundred and fifty-two when Mr. Coke succeeded to the property, had risen to nine hundred in 1833. After the death of the duke of Bedford in 1802, Mr. Coke was regarded as at the head of prac-
