Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex

Standard accounts of his death used to say that it was a brawl, largely caused by himself. But accident seems unlikely. He had recently been brought in for questioning by the Privy Council , but...

Elizabeth's personal relations with her favoured courtiers employed a condescending flirtatiousness; there were persistent but unlikely rumours that she had sexual relations, first with Leicester and later with Essex , as well as wilder rumours...

Margaret Dakins (later MH ), who was an heiress, was married at about seventeen to Walter Devereux , son of the Earl of Essex and younger brother of the Elizabethan courtier Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex .

Alfonso may (depending on whether he was the son of his father's first wife or his second) have been Aemilia's cousin; his job was the exact counterpart of her late father's. The marriage was not...

A few years later she believed, as if she had entered into one of her own fantasies for children, that she had found out the Shakespeare cipher, which comes out as definitely as the result...

The end of the 1580s saw a shift into the final period of Elizabeth's reign, marked by the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the death of Leicester (4 September 1588), and the defeat of...

She pleads with Lord Burghley for the rights of Nonconformists, and offers penetrating political, career, and medical advice to her sons and to the Earl of Essex . In many letters she dispenses godly counsel...

Her interest in Senecan tragedy parallels that which her brother expressed in his Defence of Poesie. Hers was the first dramatic treatment of Antony and Cleopatra in English; it carried a political message, a...

Both sisters become rivals in love to Queen Elizabeth (following the popular account of romantic interest in Elizabeth's life). Matilda loves, and bears a daughter by, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester . Lee's account of...