34. Cited in R. Turvey, The Treason and Trial of Sir John Perrot (Cardiff, 2005), p. 180.
35. The Fleet Prison was built in 1197, and over the centuries housed some notorious inmates, including the seventeenth-century poet John Donne. Ironically, he was also imprisoned for marital reasons. The Fleet was rebuilt several times, but was finally demolished in 1846.
36. Lansdowne MS 39, f. 171.
37. Carew Castle still survives, although now in ruins. In 1558, it had been granted to Dorothy’s father-in-law, Sir John Perrot, who began a programme of modernizing his home.
Chapter 14: My Sorrowful Wife
1. See Adams (ed.), Household Accounts.
2. Additionally, the earlier years of 1558–61 also survive.
3. Adams (ed.), Household Accounts, p. 2.
4. Ibid., pp. 245, 268.
5. Ibid., p. 313.
6. Baynard’s Castle once stood in Blackfriars, but was destroyed during the Great Fire of London. It was at Baynard’s that Richard III assumed the title of king in 1483.
7. Adams (ed.), Household Accounts, p. 239.
8. Ibid., p. 294. Dampard seems to have been employed to run small errands for Leicester on occasion, and there are several entries in his accounts for rewards paid to him. She would also have had the services of a whole host of servants besides, and at some time a former servant of her father’s, Martin Johnson, entered her household, although his occupation is unknown. Johnson is referred to in Sir Francis Knollys’s will, when the latter bequeathed him some money. See PROB 11/88/135, f. 122.
9. Dudley Papers, V, f. 16.
10. Ibid.
11. Dudley Papers, V, f. 16.
12. This is a copy of Aristotle’s Works. The cover features Leicester’s initials, and the bear and ragged staff.
13. Goldring, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, p. 3.
14. Dudley Papers, V, f. 16.
15. Dudley Papers, IX, f. 33.
16. Add MS 18985.
17. Dudley Papers, VI, f. 35.
18. When The Theatre was dismantled, parts of it were used in the building of William’s theatre, The Globe, in Southwark.
19. Spenser is best known for The Faerie Queene, which celebrates the Tudor dynasty, and more significantly, Elizabeth I.
20. Spenser dedicated this work to Leicester’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney.
21. Dudley Papers, XI, f. 38.
22. Adams (ed.), Household Accounts, pp. 197, 255.
23. Cited in Jenkins, Elizabeth and Leicester, p. 281.
24. Dudley Papers, VII, f. 56.
25. M. Margetts, ‘Lady Penelope Rich: Hilliard’s Lost Miniatures and a Surviving Portrait’, Burlington Magazine, 130:1027 (1988), p. 759. It is not known exactly when the portrait came to be at Longleat.
26. Dudley Papers, IV (52).
27. Ibid.
28. Dudley Papers, X, f. 41.
29. Elizabeth Knollys’s portrait is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
30. Gower may have gained his introduction to court through the auspices of Sir Thomas Kytson. Gower had painted a pair of portraits of Kytson and his wife in 1573, and following his royal appointment proceeded to paint many members of Elizabeth’s court.
31. Hilliard produced several miniatures of Elizabeth, and he also produced her second Great Seal, as well as a design for a third. He was the dominant figure in his field until the arrival of Isaac Oliver in the 1590s, and would continue as Court Limner to James I. See G. Reynolds, The Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Miniatures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London, 1999), p. 65.
32. Margetts, ‘Lady Penelope Rich’, p. 758.
33. Strong, ‘Faces of a Favourite’, p. 90.
34. Goldring, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, p. 275.
35. HMC Bath, V, p. 222.
36. CSPS, Elizabeth 1580–1586, III, p. 452.
37. The two met while Leicester was at Buxton, taking the medicinal waters for his health. Mary spent many of her years of imprisonment in Derbyshire, under the custodianship of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Bess of Hardwick’s fourth husband.
38. Cited in Wilson, Sweet Robin, p. 246.
39. Peck (ed.), Leicester’s Commonwealth, p. 131.
40. Jenkins, Elizabeth and Leicester, p. 287.
41. Peck (ed.), Leicester’s Commonwealth, p. 89.
42. Cited in A. Kendall, Robert Dudley: Earl of Leicester (London, 1980), p. 199.
43. H. Nicholas (ed.), Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton (London, 1847), p. 381.
44. Ibid., p. 382.
45. Ibid., p. 383.
46. CSPD, Elizabeth 1581–1590, 172, p. 192.
47. Ibid.
48. CSP Scotland, 1584–85, VII, p. 248.
49. Adams (ed.), Household Accounts, p. 197. The sex of the child is unknown. Little is known of Richard and Joan’s marriage, including the date that they were married. She was the daughter of John Heigham, a Puritan Suffolk gentleman. The couple had six children between 1586 and 1595.
50. A. Chéruel, Marie Stuart et Catherine de Médicis (Paris, 1858), p. 341.
51. Wotton, A parallel, p. 1.
52. Add MS 32092, f. 48.
53. Ibid.
54. Egerton MS 3052.
55. Birch, Memoirs, II, p. 282.
56. Peck (ed.), Leicester’s Commonwealth, p. 80.
57. F.A. Youngs, The Proclamations of the Tudor Queens (Cambridge, 1976), p. 24.
58. Peck (ed.), Leicester’s Commonwealth, p. 257.
Chapter 15: Our Mistress’s Extreme Rage
1. Adams (ed.), Household Accounts, pp. 211–12.
2. Ibid., p. 226.
3. Charles V was the nephew of Katherine of Aragon.
4. It is uncertain precisely when or why William acquired his nickname, ‘the Silent’. There are several explanations, the most common of which is that during a conversation with the French king, the monarch unwittingly revealed information that William had not known. He responded with silence, not revealing that he had been unaware of what the French king had shared with him.
5. Parma was the son of Ottavio Farnese and Margaret, who was an illegitimate daughter of the Emperor Charles V. She herself had served as Governor of the Netherlands twice, from 1559 to 1567, and again in 1578 to 1582.
6. Adams (ed.), Household Accounts, pp. 234, 236.
7. Ibid., p. 245.
8. Ibid., p. 259.
9. Ibid. The Earl of Derby was Henry Stanley, who was married to Lady Margaret Clifford, the cousin of Lady Jane Grey.
10. Adams (ed.), Household Accounts, p. 290.
11. HMC De L’Isle, p. 290.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 291.
14. Goldring, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, p. 258.
15. HMC Salisbury, III (192).
16. Sir Thomas Leigh was the son and namesake of his father, who had been Lord Mayor of London from 1558 to 1559. The former abbey of Stoneleigh had been acquired by him in 1558, and remained the home of the Leigh family until 1590. Interestingly, the Leigh family were related to the novelist Jane Austen, who visited the house in 1806. It made such an impact on her that she used details of the house in several of her novels.
17. CSP Foreign, Elizabeth September 1585–May 1586, p. 8.
18. J. Bruce (ed.), The Correspondence of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leycester, During his Government of the Low Countries, in the Years 1585 and 1586, Camden Society, XXVII (London, 1844), p. 5.
19. Ibid., p. 6. Some of Leicester’s armour can still be seen in the Royal Armouries.
20. Lacey, Robert, Earl of Essex, p. 35.
21. Bourchier Devereux, Lives and Letters, I, p. 179.
22. Ibid., p. 173.
23. Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, p. 9.
24. Ibid.
25. Bourchier Devereux, Lives and Letters, I, p. 173.
26. Cited in Freedman, Poor Penelope, p. 68.
27. Dudley Papers, VI, p. 42.
28
. Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, p. 12.
29. Camden, The Historie, p. 63.
30. The brothers-in-law were Thomas West and Philip Boteler, the husbands of Lettice’s sisters Anne and Katherine.
31. Camden, The Historie, p. 63.
32. Ibid., p. 64.
33. Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, pp. 31–2.
34. Cotton MS Galba C IX, f. 128.
35. Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, pp. 95–6.
36. Ibid., p. 96.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., p. 98.
39. Ibid., p. 102.
40. Harrison (ed.), Letters of Queen Elizabeth, p. 174.
41. Ibid., pp. 174–5.
42. Ibid.
43. Thomas Dudley later seems to have worked for Leicester’s brother, Ambrose. He died in 1593; Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, p. 112.
44. J. Stow, The Annales of England (London, 1592), p. 112.
45. Ibid.
46. Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, p. 112.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Harleian MS 287 1.
52. Cotton MS Galba C VIII, f. 46.
53. Ibid.
54. Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, p. 144.
55. Ibid., p. 151.
56. Ibid.
57. Cotton MS Galba C IX, f. 179.
58. Harrison (ed.), Letters of Queen Elizabeth, pp. 178–9.
59. B.L. Beer (ed.), A Summarie of the Chronicles of England, Diligently Collected, Abridged, And Continued unto this Present Year of Christ, 1604, by John Stow (Lewiston, 2007), p. 403.
60. Camden, The Historie, p. 64.
61. Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, p. 429.
62. Ibid., p. 417.
63. Cited in Kendall, Robert Dudley, p. 217.
64. Ibid.
65. Anthony Babington had been a page in the household of Mary’s former custodian, the Earl of Shrewsbury. In time, while travelling abroad he met and came under the influence of many who were eager to effect Mary’s release.
66. This was done with the complicity of both the local brewer and a double agent, Gilbert Gifford. Gifford arranged for letters to and from Mary to be smuggled in and out of Chartley in a beer barrel, but unbeknown to Mary and her supporters, the letters were intercepted by Walsingham and his colleagues.
67. Beer (ed.), A Summarie, p. 403. The conspirators were executed in two groups, but such was the public outcry at the bloodthirsty and barbaric manner in which the first group were killed, that the Queen gave orders that the second group were to be killed more mercifully. They were to be hanged until they were dead, before the second part of their sentence was carried out.
68. It was at Fotheringhay that the future Richard III had been born in 1452. A single block of stonework is now all that remains of the once-mighty castle.
69. Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of Robert Dudley, p. 431.
70. Harrison (ed.), The Letters of Queen Elizabeth, p. 181.
Chapter 16: A Continual Fever
1. When the executioner picked up her head it fell to the ground, and he was left holding her wig.
2. Mares (ed.), The Memoirs of Robert Carey, p. 7.
3. Beer (ed.), A Summarie, p. 403.
4. A monument marking the spot where he fell at Zutphen still survives.
5. CSPD, Elizabeth 1581–90, 188, p. 402.
6. Bourchier Devereux, Lives and Letters, I, p. 186.
7. Cited in Fenton (ed.) The Diaries of John Dee, p. 342.
8. Bourchier Devereux, Lives and Letters, I, p. 187.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 188.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 189.
16. One example of these rare medals can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery.
17. CSPS, Elizabeth 1587–1603, IV, p. 173.
18. CSPD, Elizabeth 1581–1590, 213, p. 514.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Mare (ed.), The Memoirs of Robert Carey, p. 9.
22. Ibid., p. 11.
23. Harley 6798, f. 87.
24. CSPS, Elizabeth 1587–1603, IV, p. 418.
25. Sir Henry Norris had been Henry VIII’s Groom of the Stool, and his marriage to Mary Fiennes had produced three surviving children. He had also been an ally of Anne Boleyn, which easily explains why he was a target – almost certainly falsely – in the plot to topple her.
26. Marjory never held an official position at court, but she had known the Queen since the reign of Mary I, and the two had become good friends.
27. CSPD, Elizabeth 1581–1590, 215, p. 538.
28. Ibid. The letter is now in the National Archives. Elizabeth saved many of Leicester’s private letters, and about twenty of these now survive. Most of her letters to him were probably destroyed.
29. Dudley Papers, II, 265.
30. Ibid., 273.
31. Ibid.
32. Cornbury Park is now a private estate, but the room in which Leicester is thought to have died still survives.
33. Camden, The Historie, p. 145.
34. CSPS, Elizabeth 1587–1603, IV, p. 420.
35. Ibid., pp. 420–1.
36. Ibid., p. 431.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. M. Gray, Hamlet’s Secrets Revealed: The Real Shakespeare (Bloomington, 2001), p. 546.
40. Cited in V.J. Watney, Cornbury and the Forest of Wychwood (London, 1910), p. 88.
41. PROB 1/1.
42. Ibid.
43. The Chapel is still largely original aside from the Dudley tombs and some seventeenth-century damage.
44. PROB 1/1.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. A. Weir, Elizabeth the Queen (London, 1998), p. 398.
48. PROB 1/1.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Chandler (ed.), John Leland’s Itinerary, p. 462.
52. Warnicke, Wicked Women, p. 125.
53. Beer (ed.), A Summarie, p. 412.
54. Cited in Watney, Cornbury and the Forest, p. 90.
Chapter 17: My Best Friend
1. PROB 1/1.
2. Dudley Papers, IV, 94.
3. Ibid., 33.
4. HMC Salisbury, III (761).
5. Ibid., IV (2).
6. The precise date is uncertain, but the fact that the wedding took place in July is referred to in CSPD, Elizabeth Addenda 1547–1565, p. 23.
7. His mother was a registered recusant in 1577.
8. Many examples of these can still be seen. Baddesley Clinton, Oxburgh Hall and Harvington Hall contain numerous priest holes.
9. William Allen hailed from Lancashire, and was educated at Oxford. He was publicly opposed to Elizabeth I’s Protestant regime, leaving him with no choice but to travel abroad. He took up residence at Louvain in the 1560s.
10. See WCRO, MI 229 collection.
11. While imprisoned in the Bastille in 1585. Morgan’s association with Blount is noteworthy, for he was a Catholic gentleman who had been involved in many of the plots to supplant Elizabeth with Mary, Queen of Scots.
12. Freedman, Poor Penelope, p. 74.
13. Katherine Willoughby’s second marriage was to Richard Bertie, by whom she had two children.
14. Lansdowne MS 62, f. 78r.
15. Craik, Romance of the Peerage, p. 149.
16. WCRO, MI 229.
17. Ibid.
18. See WCRO, MI 229 collection for numerous examples.
19. HMC Salisbury, IV (309).
20. Ibid., III (965).
21. Ibid.
22. WCRO, MI 229.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Craik, Romance of the Peerage, p. 151.
26. Ibid.
27. In the nineteenth century the Prime Minister Robert Peel owned D
rayton. He demolished the old manor house and instead built a brand new house on the site, where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited him in 1843. It was later demolished when it ceased to be the home of the Peel family.
28. Penelope also continued to visit Chartley, her childhood home.
29. Add MS 18985.
30. Ibid.
31. Warnicke, Wicked Women, p. 127.
32. Cited in Watney, Cornbury and the Forest, p. 90.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. CSPD, Elizabeth Addenda 1547–1565, p. 23.
36. CSPD, Elizabeth 1591–1594, 246, p. 386.
37. Watney, Cornbury and the Forest, p. 90.
38. Ibid.
39. C. Cross, The Puritan Earl: The Life of Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon (London, 1966), p. 56.
40. Ibid.
41. Camden, The Historie, p. 37.
42. PROB 11/75/493.
43. See Jenkins, Elizabeth and Leicester, p. 367.
44. His great-grandfather was William Blount. Catherine Leigh was the daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh of St Oswald’s, Yorkshire.
45. He also had a brother, William, and a sister, Anne.
46. F.M. Jones, Mountjoy 1563–1606: The Last Elizabethan Deputy (Dublin, 1958), p. 21.
47. In total the couple had had five children, one of whom died in infancy.
48. Penelope was baptized on 30 March at St Clement Danes.
49. WCRO, MI 229.
50. Sir Francis Walsingham was buried in Old St Paul’s Cathedral, but his monument was sadly destroyed during the Great Fire of London.
51. HMC Salisbury, IV (20).
52. Birch, Memoirs, II, p. 75.
53. Her mother was Ursula St Barbe. Walsingham House no longer survives.
54. Dr Lancelot Andrew performed this service.
55. HMC Salisbury, IV (31).
56. Elizabeth was the daughter of Sir Thomas Southwell by his third wife, Nazaret Newton. She had arrived at court in either 1588 or 1589, and later married Sir Barrington Molyns.
57. Thomas’s sister, Anne, also courted scandal by becoming embroiled in an affair with Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The relationship provoked both anger and violence, and Thomas himself challenged the Earl to a duel.
58. CSPD, Elizabeth 1595–1597, 253, p. 74.
59. PROB 11/167/42. Walter Devereux became very close to his half-brother, Robert, third Earl of Essex. Lettice attempted to make arrangements for Walter’s marriage, but there is no evidence that this ever took place. He died on 26 July 1641 at Essex House, and was buried at St Clement Danes.
60. Rickman, Love, Lust, and License, p. 53.
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