Lettice Knollys ( NOHLZ, sometimes latinized as Laetitia; 8 November 1543 – 25 December 1634) was an English noblewoman and mother to the courtiers Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and Penelope, Lady Rich. She was Countess of Essex during her first marriage to Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex and became Countess of Leicester after her second marriage to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. She was also the granddaughter of Mary Boleyn, a mistress of Henry VIII and sister to his second wife, Anne Boleyn. With her marriage to her cousin Elizabeth I's favourite, she incurred the Queen's unrelenting displeasure.
A great-niece of Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn, and close to Elizabeth since childhood, Lettice Knollys was introduced early into court life. At 17 she married Walter Devereux, Viscount Hereford, who in 1572 became Earl of Essex. After her husband went to Ireland in 1573, she possibly became involved with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's longtime favourite. There was plenty of scandalous talk, not least when Essex died in Ireland of dysentery in 1576. On 20 September 1578, Lettice Knollys was married to Leicester in private by his chaplain Humphrey Tyndall. When the Queen was told of the marriage, she banished the Countess permanently from court, effectively curtailing her social life. The couple's only child, Robert Dudley, Lord Denbigh, died at the age of three, to the great grief of his parents and ending all prospects for the continuance of the House of Dudley. Lettice Knollys' union with Leicester was nevertheless a happy one, as was her third marriage to the much younger Sir Christopher Blount, whom she unexpectedly married in 1589 only six months after the Earl's death. She continued to style herself Lady Leicester.
The Countess was left rich under Leicester's will; yet the discharge of his overwhelming debts diminished her wealth. Between 1604 and 1605, she successfully defended her widow's rights in court when her possessions and her good name were threatened by the Earl's illegitimate son, also named Robert Dudley, who claimed that he was his father's legitimate heir, thus implicitly declaring her marriage bigamous. Lettice was always close to her large family circle. Helpless at the political eclipse of her eldest son, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, she lost both him and her third husband when they were executed for treason by Elizabeth in 1601. From the 1590s she lived chiefly in the Staffordshire countryside, where, in reasonably good health until the end, she died at the impressive age of 91 on Christmas Day 1634.
Lettice Knollys was born on 8 November 1543 at Rotherfield Greys, Oxfordshire. Her father, Sir Francis Knollys, was a Member of Parliament and acted as Master of the Horse to Prince Edward. Her mother, Catherine Carey, was a daughter of Mary Boleyn, sister to Anne Boleyn. Thus Catherine was Elizabeth I's first cousin, and Lettice Knollys her first cousin once removed. Lettice was the third of her parents' 16 children.
Sir Francis and his wife were Protestants. In 1556 they went to Frankfurt in Germany to escape religious persecution under Queen Mary I, taking five of their children with them. It is unknown whether Lettice was among them, and she may have passed the next few years in the household of Princess Elizabeth, with whom the family had a close relationship since the mid-1540s. Her parents and the remainder of the family returned to England in January 1559, two months after Elizabeth I's succession. Francis Knollys was appointed Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household; Lady Knollys became a senior Lady of the Bedchamber, and her daughter Lettice a Maid of the Privy Chamber.
First marriage and love affair
In late 1560 Lettice Knollys married Walter Devereux, Viscount Hereford. The couple lived at the family seat of Chartley in Staffordshire. Here, the two eldest of their five children, the daughters Penelope and Dorothy, were born in 1563 and 1564, respectively. Lettice Devereux returned to court on at least one occasion, in the summer of 1565, when the Spanish ambassador Diego Guzmán de Silva described her as "one of the best-looking ladies of the court" and as a favourite with the Queen. Pregnant with her first son, she flirted with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the Queen's favourite. The Queen found out at once and succumbed to a fit of jealousy. The Viscountess retired to Herefordshire where, in November 1565, she gave birth to Robert, later 2nd Earl of Essex. Two more sons followed: Walter, who was born in 1569, and Francis, who died soon after birth at an unknown date.
Lettice's husband was raised to the earldom of Essex in 1572. In 1573 he successfully suggested to the Queen a project to plant Englishmen in Ulster. In the autumn he went to Ireland, not to return for two years. During this time Lettice Devereux possibly engaged in a love affair with the Earl of Leicester; her whereabouts in the following years are largely unknown, though. In 1573 Leicester sent her a present of venison at Chartley from his seat Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, and she made hunting visits to Kenilworth in 1574 and 1576. She was also present in July 1575 when Dudley entertained the Queen with a magnificent 19-day festival at the castle. Elizabeth and the court (including the Earl of Leicester) then progressed to Chartley, where they were welcomed by the Countess of Essex.
When Walter Devereux returned to England in December 1575, the Spanish agent in London, Antonio de Guaras, reported:As the thing is publicly talked of in the streets, there can be no harm in my writing openly about the great enmity between the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex, in consequence, it is said, of the fact that while Essex was in Ireland his wife had two children by Leicester. ... Great discord is expected in consequence.
These rumours were elaborated on years later in Leicester's Commonwealth, a Catholic underground libel against the Protestant Earl of Leicester that satirically detailed his alleged enormities. Here the Countess of Essex, after having a daughter by Leicester, kills a second child "cruelly and unnaturally" by abortion to prevent her homecoming husband from discovering her affair. There is no evidence that any such children ever existed.
The Earl of Essex returned to Ireland in July 1576. At Dublin, he died of dysentery on 22 September during an epidemic, bemoaning the "frailness of women" in his last words. Rumours of poison, administered by Leicester, immediately sprang up and continued, notwithstanding an official investigation which concluded that Essex had died of natural causes. His body was carried over to Carmarthen, where his widow attended the funeral.
The Countess' jointure, the lands left to her under her husband's will, was too little to live by and did not comprise Chartley, so that she and her children had to seek accommodation elsewhere. She partly lived in her father's house at Rotherfield Greys, but also with friends; Leicester's Commonwealth claimed that Leicester had her move "up and down the country from house to house by privy ways". She pleaded for an augmentation of her jointure with the authorities and, to reach a compromise with the late Earl's executors, threatened "by some froward advice" to claim her dower rights. These would have amounted to one third of the Devereux estate. After seven months of wrangling, she reached a more satisfactory settlement, the Countess declaring to be "content to respect my children more than myself". She equally—though unsuccessfully—tried to move the Queen to forgive Essex' debts to the Crown, which very much burdened the inheritance of her son, the young Earl of Essex.
Marriage to Leicester and banishment from court
Lettice Knollys married Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester on 21 September 1578 at around seven o'clock in the morning. Only six other people were present at the Earl's country house of Wanstead Hall in Essex; among these were the bride's father and brother, Francis and Richard Knollys; the bridegroom's brother, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick; and his two friends, the Earl of Pembroke and Lord North. The officiating chaplain Humphrey Tyndall later remarked that the bride wore a "loose gown" (an informal morning dress), which has triggered modern speculation that she was pregnant and that the ceremony happened under pressure from her father. The marriage was, however, in planning between Leicester and his wedding guests for almost a year. While Lettice Devereux may well have been pregnant, there is no further indication as to this. The marriage date coincided with the end of the customary two-years-mourning for a widow.