generally thought that the Earl stopped his mouth, and made up the business
betwixt them; and the good Earl, to make plain to the world the great love he
bare to her while alive, and what a grief the loss of so virtuous a lady was to
his tender heart, caused, (though the thing, by these and other means, was
beaten into the heads of the principal men of the university of Oxford) her body
to be re-buried in St. Mary's Church in Oxford with great pomp and solemnity. It
is remarkable, when Dr. Babington, the Earl's chaplain, did preach the funeral
sermon, he tript once or twice in his speech, by recommending to their memories
that virtuous lady so pitifully murdered, instead of saying pitifully slain.
This Earl, after all his murders and poisonings, was himself poisoned by that
which was prepared for others (some say by his wife at Cornbury Lodge before
mentioned), though Baker in his Chronicle would have it at Killingworth, anno
1588.«1
    The same accusation has been adopted and circulated by the author of
Leicester's Commonwealth, a satire written directly against the Earl of
Leicester, which loaded him with the most horrid crimes, and, among the rest,
with the murder of his first wife. It was alluded to in the Yorkshire Tragedy, a
play erroneously ascribed to Shakspeare, where a rake, who determines to destroy
all his family, throws his wife down stairs, with this allusion to the supposed
murder of Leicester's Lady -
 
The only way to charm, a woman's tongue
Is, break her neck - a politician did it.
 
The reader will find I have borrowed several incidents as well as names from
Ashmole, and the more early authorities; but my first acquaintance with the
history was through the more pleasing medium, of verse. There is a period in
youth when the mere power of numbers has a more strong effect on ear and
imagination than in more advanced life. At this season of immature taste the
Author was greatly delighted with the poems of Mickle and Langhorne, poets who,
though by no means deficient in the higher branches of their art, were eminent
for their powers of verbal melody above most who have practised this department
of poetry. One of those pieces of Mickle, which the author was particularly
pleased with, is a ballad, or rather a species of elegy, on the subject of
Cumnor Hall, which, with others by the same author, were to be found in Evans's
Ancient Ballads (volume iv. page 130),