The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato - the best part under ground.

The situation now turned into a deadly duel between the mistress and the friend. "It is easy to be seen that he would threaten me with laying an aspersion upon me of being in some sort accessory to his crime". In the autumn of 1595 he became a gentleman commoner of Queen's College Oxford took his degree of BA in 1598 and came to London to study law in the Middle Temple.

His poem A Wife which depicted the virtues that a young man should demand of a woman played a large role in the events that precipitated his murder.