"What should Cicero the Senator use persuasions to Captain Catiline and his crew that quietness and order were better than hurley-burlies? Is it possible that our aspirers will ever permit any such thing, cause, or matter to be treated in our state as may tend to the stability of her Majesty’s present government? No, surely, it standeth nothing with their wisdom or policy, especially at this instant, when they have such opportunity of following their own actions in her Majesty’s name under the vizard and pretext of her defense and safety; having sowed in every man’s head so many imaginations of the dangers present both abroad and at home, from Scotland, Flanders, Spain, and Ireland, so many conspiracies, so many intended murders, and others so many contrived or conceived mischiefs as my Lord of Leicester assureth himself that the troubled water can not be cleared again in short space, nor his baits and lines laid therein easily espied, but rather that hereby ere long he will catch the fish he gapeth so greedily after, and in the meantime, for the pursuit of these crimes and other that daily he will find out, himself must remain perpetual dictator."

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Added on April 10, 2026
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Original Language: English

Sources

' (1584); D.C. Peck, ed. (Ohio University Press, 1985)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Dudley%2C_1st_Earl_of_Leicester