He Married The Daughter And Sole Heir Of Sir
Frances Walsingham, The Secretary Of State, A Lady Destined To The
Bed of honour, who, after his deplorable death at Zutphen, in the
Low Countries, where he was at the time
Of his uncle Leicester's
being there, was remarried to the Lord of Essex, and, since his
death, to my Lord of St. Albans, all persons of the sword, and
otherwise of great honour and virtue.
They have a very quaint conceit of him, that Mars and Mercury fell
at variance whose servant he should be; and there is an
epigrammatist that saith that Art and Nature had spent their
excellences in his fashioning, and, fearing they could not end what
they had begun, they bestowed him up for time, and Nature stood mute
and amazed to behold her own mark; but these are the particulars of
poets.
Certain it is he was a noble and matchless gentleman, and it may be
said justly of him, without these hyperboles of faction, as it was
of Cato Uticensis, that he seemed to be born only to that which he
went about, VIR SATILIS INGENII, as Plutarch saith it; but to speak
more of him were to make them less.
WALSINGHAM.
Sir Francis Walsingham, as we have said, had the honour to be Sir
Philip Sidney's father-in-law; he was a gentleman at first, of a
good house, and of a better education, and from the University
travelled for the rest of his learning.
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