“At your Lordship’s little house near Charing Cross, this present Friday, late at night, 15th of May, 1579.
“Your Lordship’s most humble and obedient loving son, “GILBERT TALBOT.
“I wish it would please your Lordship to remember my Lord Chancellor with some gift. It would be very well bestowed.”
Thus, because of the possibility of larger treasons, the warder of Mary of Scotland and his family must needs swallow their private grievances, forgive their truculent tenants, and appear wreathed with smiles. They must maintain their estate, in spite of their increasing liabilities and the churlishness of the Royal Exchequer, and above all they must keep my Lord Treasurer well supplied with _douceurs_.
Why they did not sell a portion of their vast inheritance at this juncture in order to make matters comfortable one cannot understand. In London the Earl’s creditors were pressing him, and he was too conscientious to let the matter stand longer than avoidable.
A new responsibility was about to be thrust on the Talbots in securing the hereditary rights of their grandchild Arabella. For the Dowager Lady Lennox died in this year quite suddenly at her house at Hackney. It was odd that the guest who last saw her was the man whom she had accused of slaying his wife, and whose treachery she had once denounced. Lord Leicester went down to talk business with her at Hackney, relating, no doubt, to the sorry state of her financial affairs, and stayed to dine with her. Just after he left she was taken violently ill, and died two days later. What she had to bequeath—and Heaven knows it was little enough—in the way of jewels she left to Arabella Stuart. With the death of her son, Lennox, the ties which bound her to life practically disappeared, and she succumbed at the age of sixty-seven to a disease which must have been aggravated by the terrible misfortunes of her extraordinary life. Her own dowry of Scottish lands made her no return because of the war-bound condition of her native country; the sons who owned the estates conferred on her husband by Henry VIII were all dead. Her land in Yorkshire passed from her with the death, one presumes, of her last son, and her fatherless granddaughter was, as Strickland says, “heiress to nought but sorrow and a royal pedigree.”