Lettice Knolly, Countess of Essex and Countess of Leicester, was an English noblewomen. After her marriage to Elizabeth 1's favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, she incurred the Queen's unrelenting displeasure.
Lettice came to Court as a maid of honour at the start of Elizabeth’s reign and soon established herself as a girl of spirit, beauty, and ambition. She married, in 1561, Walter Devereux, Viscount Hereford, who was created Earl of Essex in 1572. By him she had Penelope, Dorothy, Robert, Walter, and Francis. In the summer of 1575, on progress with the Queen, Edward Arden, sheriff of Warwickshire, refused to wear Leicester’s livery for the festivities at Kenilworth because he had “private access to the Countess of Essex.” According to one account of the incident, Arden called Leicester a “whoremaster”. The anonymous 1584 pamphlet known as Leicester’s Commonwealth claimed that Lady Essex was pregnant by Leicester immediately before her husband’s return from Ireland and that she had an abortion.
When Lettice was at Court in Jul, 1579, with a new wardrobe that rivalled the Queen’s. When her marriage to Leicester became known, the Queen is said to have boxed her ears and banished her, saying that as but one sun lighted the sky so she would have but one Queen of England. Away from Court, Lettice went out of her way to be mistaken for her royal cousin, riding through the streets of London in a carriage with her ladies in coaches behind her, and so forth. She planned to marry her daughter Dorothy to the King of Scotland. When the Queen heard of it, according to another Spaniard, Mendoza, she swore she would “sooner the Scots King lost his crown” than be married to the daughter of a “she-wolf.” She also said that if she could find no other way to check Lady Leicester’s ambition she would proclaim her all over Christendom as the whore she was and prove Leicester a cuckold.
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