Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex

Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, was a favourite of Elizabeth I who gained popularity through military service and cultivated an image of Protestant chivalry. His expeditions in France, Spain and the Azores produced mixed results, and his command in Ireland ended in unauthorised negotiation and return to court. After losing influence, Essex led a failed uprising in London in 1601. He was convicted of treason and executed.

Margaret George’s Elizabeth I gives Essex a major role in the queen’s later years, and he appears in many novels about the final Elizabethan court. Fiction often treats their relationship as a tragic conflict between ageing queen and impulsive young favourite. The political struggle also involved patronage networks, war policy and Essex’s inability to accept subordination.

In Peter Tonkin’s Shadow of the Axe, after Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, bursts into Elizabeth I’s private chamber at Nonsuch, Robert Cecil begins planning the favourite’s final political destruction. In Alison Weir’s The Life of Elizabeth I, against the wider background of religious settlement, rebellion, war with Spain and the rise and fall of Essex, Elizabeth appears as an intelligent but guarded ruler whose survival depended on balancing competing factions. Other novels featuring Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex include Rory Clements’s Revenger, Elizabeth Fremantle’s Watch the Lady, Peter Tonkin’s A Verse to Murder, Peter Tonkin’s Shadow of Poison, and Winston Graham’s The Grove of Eagles.