No. 49.
ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX.
BORN 1567, EXECUTED 1601.
Full length. White dress. Embroidered vest. George, Ribbon, and Garter. Left hand resting on the pommel of his sword; right hand holding a cane.
THE eldest son of Walter, first Earl of Essex of the Devereux family, by Lettice, daughter of Sir Francis Knollys, Knight. He succeeded to the title and estates before he had reached his ninth year. But his father’s solicitude had provided him with worthy guardians; Lords Burghley and Sussex, and Dr. Waterhouse, of whom, in his last moments, Walter, Lord Essex, took leave in these terms—‘Farewell, Ned; thou art the friendliest and faithfullest gentleman that ever I knew;’ and well did Waterhouse fulfil the trust imposed on him by his dying friend, he took the direction of the minor’s affairs, which he managed with great ability, and watched over the boy himself, with paternal care.
In 1577 young Essex went to Cambridge, where he bore an excellent character, and gained the reputation of ‘an elegant scholar,’ while his refined and genial manners made him generally popular. He remained at the University till 1581, when he retired to his country house in Pembrokeshire, and seemed to have ‘become enamoured of a rural life.’ In 1584, on his first presentation at Court, he found his stepfather, the Earl of Leicester, reigning supreme, with whom he was in no way inclined to stand on friendly relations. The sudden death of Essex’s father, and the indecent haste of his mother’s marriage with Robert Dudley, were too vivid in his remembrance. But the royal ægis had been thrown over the pair, and the matter had been hushed up. Lord Leicester strove by every means in his power to propitiate his wife’s son, and the young man was not proof against the professions of affection, or the prospects of advancement. At least so it would seem, for in the following year the two Earls went together to the Low Countries, Leicester as Captain-General, and Essex (though not more than eighteen at the time) as General of the Horse. Here the latter was greatly commended for his valour, more especially at the battle of Zutphen.
On his return to England he was made Master of the Horse, and not only intrusted with a high command in the army, at the time of the threatened Spanish invasion, but invested with the Order of the Garter—a proceeding which excited no little jealousy. Lord Leicester dying in the same year, the post of first favourite became vacant, and to that dangerous elevation was the new knight elected without loss of time; and now began afresh the disgraceful farce which Elizabeth Tudor had already enacted with Leicester, and in a minor degree with Sir Philip Sidney, and others. Alas! this time the curtain was to fall on a tragedy. The Queen’s coquetries, her advances and retreats, her attacks on the citadel of the handsome and accomplished courtier’s heart, are part of history, and need not be detailed here. Notwithstanding the honours she heaped upon him, his eager spirit was often ‘vexed past patience,’ even in these early days.
In 1589 he absented himself without leave from Court, even as Sir Philip Sidney had done before him, and sailed with Sir Francis Drake on his expedition to Portugal. Elizabeth ordered him to return in a most peremptory letter written with her own hand; but when he did so, she received him with open arms, keeping up for some time a skirmish of lover’s quarrels. At length her indignation was seriously aroused on learning the old story, that her favourite had married without her permission.
She called it a mésalliance, a word that could scarcely apply in the case of the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, and the widow of Sir Philip Sidney.