Lettice Knollys was an English noblewoman whose family connections placed her close to the Tudor court. Born in 1543, she was the daughter of Sir Francis Knollys and Catherine Carey and a granddaughter of Mary Boleyn. She married Walter Devereux, later 1st Earl of Essex, and had several children, including Robert Devereux, the future favourite of Elizabeth I. After Essex’s death in Ireland in 1576, Lettice became a wealthy widow with significant court connections.
In 1578 Lettice secretly married Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth I’s long-standing favourite. The queen reacted angrily and Lettice was effectively excluded from her presence, though the marriage endured until Leicester’s death in 1588. Lettice later married Sir Christopher Blount and lived through the downfall of her son Robert, who was executed after his failed rebellion in 1601; Blount was also executed. She survived these political catastrophes by more than three decades, dying in 1634.
In Tracy Borman’s Elizabeth’s Women, Mary I, Mary, Queen of Scots, the Grey sisters, Lettice Knollys and Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting reveal different forms of kinship, rivalry and intimacy around the throne. In Margaret George’s Elizabeth I, its alternating viewpoints set Elizabeth against her cousin Lettice Knollys, whose secret marriage to Robert Dudley destroyed her place at court. Tony Riches’s Penelope – Tudor Baroness portrays Lettice Knollys as Penelope Devereux’s mother and follows the consequences of Lettice’s secret marriage to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, within the tightly controlled world of Elizabeth I’s court.
