Little wonder, then, that when word reached Lettice of Robin Sheffield’s actions, she was quick to respond. Though she was by now sixty years old, she was determined to fight her corner with all the spirit she had possessed in her youth – unsurprisingly, for there was much at stake. On 10 February 1604, Lettice filed a bill in the Star Chamber against her second husband’s ‘base son’, confidently asserting that his claim to be legitimate was false. It had been many years since she had been at court, but Lettice still had powerful allies in the King’s Chief Minster Robert Cecil and Sir Robert Sidney. More significantly, she also produced fifty-six witnesses who testified that her husband had never considered Robin Sheffield to be his legitimate son.
In what became known as ‘the great cause’, Robin Sheffield was fixed upon proving her wrong. It was at this time that his mother, Douglas, emerged from the shadows. Initially, she had been reluctant, but now she was determined to support her son, and testified that she and Leicester had indeed been married. This is highly unlikely to have been true, and nobody believed either Douglas or Robin Sheffield’s claims. Robin would claim that Lettice had removed crucial papers from the ‘evidence house’ at Kenilworth that proved the truth of his legitimacy – certainly if such papers had existed, it would have been in Lettice’s interests to have done so, but there is equally no evidence that she did. The testimony of his mother was the best that Robin had to offer, but it was not enough to secure a verdict in his favour. The case dragged on for more than a year, but it ultimately fell apart. When delivering judgement in her favour on 4 May 1605, Cecil described Lettice in glowing terms; he praised her for standing by Leicester, though ‘she was long disgraced with the Queen’. In reality Lettice had had no choice, for if Robin Sheffield had been successful she stood to lose everything. That was something that she was simply not prepared to let happen.
Robin Sheffield was devastated by the result, and left England for good. In so doing he abandoned his wife and their children, and instead took his mistress Elizabeth Southwell (not the same Elizabeth that bore Essex’s illegitimate son) with him. His mother tried to maintain contact with him, but Douglas died in December 1608, and was buried beside her husband Edward Stafford in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster. Robin, meanwhile, lived out his days largely in Florence, where he died on 6 September 1649.14 He never came into what he believed to be his rightful inheritance, and though for Lettice the legal dispute was at an end and she had achieved a favourable result, she was not given time to enjoy her retirement.
IN THE YEARS following the execution of her son, Lettice’s energies were largely devoted to her grandchildren. She had always cherished a particular soft spot for Essex’s son and namesake, Robert, who stirred fond memories in her of her own son. Theirs was an endearing relationship, and not only did the pair write regular letters, but Robert also visited his grandmother at Drayton Bassett most winters. She was therefore delighted when he too became a recipient of the new King’s favour. At James’s accession, twelve-year-old Robert carried the King’s sword before him when he made his ceremonial entry into London in April, and he was appointed to serve in the household of Prince Henry. Even more gratifying was the fact that James also restored his hereditary title of the earldom of Essex that his father had forfeited following his condemnation. There was now a new Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.
Young Robert was not Lettice’s only grandchild, and in total she came to have nineteen surviving grandchildren, as well as great-grandchildren that were born during her lifetime. She was fond of all of them, and Penelope and her children frequently visited her at Drayton Bassett. Their presence was clearly good for her, and in September 1606 Penelope would write to Robert Cecil that ‘My mother, I think, will grow young with their company.’15 By 1604, Dorothy’s marriage to the Earl of Northumberland had also produced four surviving young children – Dorothy, Lucy, Algernon and Henry – and they too spent time with their grandmother during their youths. In 1604, Dorothy’s husband was also granted Syon House in fee simple, meaning that he now had permanent tenure of the property. Owning the house that the family had called home for many years gave Northumberland the encouragement he needed to begin making extensive improvements to it, and the royal couple were regular visitors.16 Sadly, it was all about to go horribly wrong.
JAMES I WAS a Protestant monarch, yet English Catholics had rejoiced at his accession. They were hopeful that his reign would bring the toleration to practise their religion freely that they had been denied during the latter years of the Elizabethan regime. Following the Papal Bull of 1570 that saw Pope Pius V excommunicate the Queen, English Catholics had been treated with increasing severity, and many were heavily fined and imprisoned for their faith. They were therefore disappointed to discover that James’s policy was no different, and it was this that led a group of men to conspire to blow up the King and the royal family when Parliament met in 1605. Many of the conspirators, including the leader Robert Catesby, had also once participated in the Essex Rebellion, while Francis Tresham was a distant relation of Lettice’s.17 Through Queen Elizabeth’s good graces these men had been pardoned, but now they plotted infinitely worse. In November 1605, the plot was discovered, causing a huge stir with the King and the government. The conspirators were ruthlessly sought out, and after a standoff at Holbeach House in the Midlands, many were killed or injured.18 For those that survived there was to be no mercy, and in January 1606 eight men, including Guido Fawkes, were hung, drawn and quartered in London.19 The Gunpowder Plot would also have disastrous consequences for members of Lettice’s own family.
One of the key plotters was Thomas Percy, a relative of Lettice’s son-in-law, and Dorothy’s husband, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland.20 When it came to light that Thomas had dined with the Earl on the evening of 4 November – the day before the conspirators had planned to blow up Parliament – Northumberland fell under a cloud of suspicion. He strenuously denied any involvement, but despite his protestations he was arrested and sent to the Tower for questioning. To make matters worse, Thomas had been shot during the skirmish at Holbeach.21 When Northumberland heard of this, he wrote to the Council on 10 November begging them desperately to send a good surgeon to tend to him, ‘for none but he can show me clear as the day or dark as the night’.22 Thomas’s injuries were fatal, and to Northumberland’s despair his death meant that his kinsman was unable to clear him of conspiracy.
Northumberland’s arrest had a great impact on Dorothy and her children, and Lettice would have done her best to support her daughter and grandchildren. Northumberland’s separation from his young family was difficult. Although he and Dorothy had had their differences in the past, Dorothy now followed in the footsteps of her mother and her sister and adopted the role of intercessor. She had inherited much of her mother’s temperament, and so persistent was she in her petitions to Robert Cecil for her husband’s release that he eventually refused to see her. Dorothy had, it seems, gone too far, for Cecil explained to her husband that he ‘forebore to return any one harsh word to the contumelious language she used’.23 Needless to say, Dorothy’s appeals were unsuccessful, but fortunately for Northumberland, her behaviour did not affect the conditions in which he was kept. He was housed in the Martin Tower, where his lodgings were comfortable, and his family were allowed to visit him regularly. On 26 June 1606, his case was heard in the Star Chamber, and, unconvinced that he was completely innocent as he claimed, he was deprived of all of his honours. Additionally, he was fined the crippling sum of £30,000 (£3,019,000) and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Tower.24 It could have been worse, for he had avoided a sentence of death, and the fine was later reduced to £11,000 (£1,107,000): by 1613 the balance had been cleared. His imprisonment, though, was destined to continue, and before long his family had actually moved into the Tower with him.
MATTERS WERE DIFFICULT not only for Lettice’s younger daughter, but for her eldest, too. Lettice herself felt helpless, for there was little that she could do to aid th
em. In the same year that the Gunpowder Plot came to light, after fourteen years of marriage and many years of playing the cuckold, Lord Rich decided that he could tolerate forty-two-year-old Penelope’s infidelity no longer. Her brother was dead, and all of the powerful influence he had once been able to wield to Rich’s advantage had gone with him. As a consequence, Rich deemed her family to be of no further use to him. He began proceedings to divorce Penelope, and on 14 November their marriage came to an end on the grounds of adultery. Nevertheless, both parties were legally forbidden from remarrying while the other lived – terms to which Penelope paid little heed. She and her lover Charles Blount were still passionately in love, and had resolved to be together. It was a situation with which Lettice could wholeheartedly sympathize.
Ignoring the legal terms of her separation from Lord Rich, on 26 December Penelope and Charles were finally married. The wedding took place at Lettice’s former home of Wanstead, where the couple now resided, and was performed by Charles’s chaplain, William Laud.25 It is most probable that Lettice knew of her daughter’s nuptials, and she may also have visited them at Wanstead. If she did then the house would have been full of memories for her, not all of them pleasant, for it was here that her son ‘the Noble Imp’ had died. History appeared to be repeating itself, for the King was maddened when he learned that Penelope and Charles had married. He was set on making divorce laws tighter in an attempt to enforce stricter rules on morality, and told Blount to his face that he had got a ‘fair woman with a black soul’.26 There was little time to dwell further on the matter, however, for just months later tragedy struck. At nine o’clock on the evening of 3 April 1606, Charles died of a respiratory infection at Savoy House on the Strand.27 On 7 May, he was buried in St Paul’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, although no monument for him was ever erected. The love that he and Penelope had shared had endured many obstacles, and they had fought hard to be together. She was left crushed by his loss, and was forced to contend with a further blow when it became clear that because their marriage was not legally recognized, their children were deemed to be illegitimate. Fiercely protective of her children in the same way that Lettice was, there was no question of Penelope letting the matter lie. Despite her grief, she was forced to undergo a lawsuit that dragged on, and of which she would not live to reap the benefits.
FOR AS MUCH as the reign of James I had promised Lettice and her family prosperity, it had also brought her two daughters great heartache. Following the death of her short-lived second husband, Penelope and her children retreated to the familiar countryside that Drayton Bassett provided. Here Lettice was able to spend time with her daughter and her grandchildren, condoling and sharing in their grief. The comforting presence of her mother was just the kind of balm that Penelope needed, and Lettice in turn was more protective of her vulnerable daughter than usual. As the summer months drew to a close and Penelope returned home to Wanstead, neither she nor her mother could have realized that that summer would be the last that they would spend together.
As Lettice continued with her quiet retirement in the countryside, she was kept abreast of affairs by letters from her daughters and grandchildren. She may have been told that, during the following summer of 1607, Penelope had travelled to London from Wanstead. Soon after her arrival she fell ill, and it quickly became clear that her malady was serious. Reports about her final illness are fragmentary, and there may not even have been time to get a message to Lettice. It came as a heart-breaking shock when she received the news that forty-four-year-old Penelope had died on 7 July at Westminster.28 The bond shared by mother and daughter ran deeper than most, due in part to the fact that Penelope was also Lettice’s firstborn child. In the space of just over a year Penelope and Charles’s five children had become orphans, and her four surviving children by Lord Rich were now motherless.
Even by contemporary standards, when mortality was much higher than today, the loss that Lettice had been forced to bear was extreme. She had been widowed three times over, and of the six children that she had born – most of whom she had watched grow to maturity, only to have them taken from her just as they entered their prime – just one, Dorothy, now survived. As she mourned the loss of her dearly beloved daughter, Lettice was forced to accept that the world as she had known it was rapidly coming to an end. Time was passing, and so too were those she loved.
CHAPTER 22
The Wars with Thunder, and the Court with Stars
FOLLOWING THE EXECUTION of her third husband, Sir Christopher Blount, Lettice had chosen not to remarry, instead turning her attention to her grandchildren. In her later years she was active in arranging marriages for them, and was eager that they ought to make advantageous matches. She cannot have been pleased, then, when the marriage of her favourite grandson, Robert, third Earl of Essex, culminated in disaster.
On 5 January 1606, just days before his fifteenth birthday, Robert had been married to the beautiful Frances Howard, the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk.1 Although Lettice was not there to witness her grandson’s wedding, she heartily approved of it, for it was a good match for Robert: as a member of the prestigious Howard family, Frances was distantly related to both Lettice and Robert.2 The impetus for the marriage had little to do with Lettice, for some sources say that it was the bride’s mother, the Countess of Suffolk, who was the driving force.3 Frances herself was only eight months older than her groom, and as such the couple were judged to be too young to live together at this time. It was not until the beginning of 1609, when young Robert returned from a tour of Europe, that the couple began to cohabit. Unfortunately, it was a notoriously unhappy marriage. Although Robert loved his wife and took her to visit his grandmother at Drayton Bassett, his feelings were not reciprocated. Frances later began an affair with Robert Carr, one of the King’s favourites, and in 1613 her marriage to Robert was annulled on the grounds that he was impotent. Lettice was naturally sympathetic to her grandson, and it was to her that Robert turned when his marriage culminated in failure. He retreated from court to Lettice’s former home of Chartley, now his main Staffordshire residence. From here he made regular visits to his grandmother’s house at nearby Drayton Bassett, and the two became close companions. As fate would have it, Robert had had a lucky escape: having remarried to Robert Carr, with whom she had been conducting an affair while married to Robert, Frances later caused a sensation when she admitted to poisoning Carr’s friend, Sir Thomas Overbury. Overbury had been greatly opposed to the marriage of his friend to Frances, primarily because it would bring Carr into alliance with the Howards. This caused an estrangement between the two friends, and Carr supported Overbury’s imprisonment in the Tower in 1613 for contempt. But Frances greatly resented Overbury’s interference in the matter, and sought to destroy him. With the connivance of her friend, Anne Turner, Frances began to send Overbury ‘poisoned food and medicine’ in the form of tarts and jellies in his Tower quarters. As a result, five months after his imprisonment he died a slow and agonizing death. It was two months later that Frances and Carr were married. It seemed like the perfect crime, but it was one that would return to haunt her.
Soon after Overbury’s death, rumours began to circulate that the unfortunate man had been poisoned. The gossip persisted, and subsequent investigations swiftly confirmed that poisoned items had indeed been sent to him while he was in the Tower. All of the evidence pointed in the direction of Frances and her husband, and in 1615, two years after Overbury’s death, a state trial was held to determine the truth of the matter.
The trial was sensational, and when the judge asked Frances ‘art though guilty of this felony and murder, or not guilty?’ she astounded everyone by pleading guilty. All of those involved were found guilty and sentenced to death, including Frances and her husband, the latter of whom was almost certainly guiltless. Frances and Carr were sent to the Tower but, despite admitting her guilt, Frances was spared the death penalty. Her accomplice, Anne Turner, was not so fortunate, and was taken to Tyburn, where she was ha
nged. Although she survived, Frances was imprisoned in the Tower, where she remained until 1622.4 Finally, the King pardoned her, and with her husband Carr she retired into a life of obscurity. The Devereux family never had anything more to do with her.
ROBERT HAD INHERITED much of his father’s hot-headedness, and in 1611 an argument with Prince Henry drew blood when Robert hit the Prince with a tennis racquet, after the Prince had called him the son of a traitor. His father’s treachery was a sore point, but he nevertheless resolved matters with the Prince. After 1614, Robert frequently brought his friend Arthur Wilson to visit his grandmother, who recorded many of the details of their visits. These show that the three often spent their time in recreational pursuits, including hunting, in which Lettice still took great pleasure despite her advancing years. She was nevertheless delighted when Robert eventually married again in 1630, taking as his second wife Elizabeth Paulet. Apart from occasional visits elsewhere, Lettice was now spending her time almost exclusively at Drayton Bassett, where she was living in luxury.
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