Thus it was as well for the whole family that my Lady came to the fore again and wrestled with Gilbert, for he had flattery enough from some of his friends to feed his vanity in his new position. The garrulous Richard Topcliffe covered several pages in a letter expressing gladness that it had pleased God to set the heir in the seat of his noble ancestors. “At such an alteration of a house as now hath chanced by your father’s death, there is ever great expecting towards the rising of the sun.” It is an absurd, toadying letter, of which the only sincere part is the writer’s definition of it at the close as “my tedious dream.” Of such letters Gilbert received his share, like his father, and was flooded with all sorts of other correspondence—official, semi-official, and private. He assumes his father’s office in the lieutenancy of three counties, issues his orders for armament. He meant excellently well no doubt, but was not in the worldly sense a success. He could never, like his father, have borne the Queen’s heavy burdens from sheer devotion to a patriotic ideal and from horror of incurring her disfavour. His disputes with his tenantry so overpowered him that he was forced to refer the matter to the Queen. Her opinion was against him and on the side of the tenants. Meanwhile the Stanhope quarrel became a regular county affair, and, as Hunter puts it, “was pursued by both parties with such precipitation and violence that it was rendered impossible for the neighbouring gentry to preserve neutrality.” It is not surprising that five years after his father’s death he was thoroughly out of favour. Yet Elizabeth could be very kind to his children. One of her gentleman ushers, his friend, Richard Brakenbury, writing from Court, sent him in a letter to Rufford a pretty picture of the way she fondled his little girl:—
“If I should write how much her Majesty this day did make of the little lady your daughter, with often kissing (which her Majesty seldom useth to any) and then amending her dressing with pins, and still carrying her with her Majesty in her own barge, and so into the Privy Council lodgings, and so homeward from the running, you would scarce believe me. Her Majesty said (as true it is) that she is very like my Lady her grandmother. She behaved herself with such modesty as I pray God she may possess at twenty years old.”