Robert Dudley had known Elizabeth I since they were children. When she came to the throne in AD 1558 she appointed him Master of the Horse. She loved hunting and he was her constant companion in the chase. From the summer of 1560 their romance was notorious. But Dudley was already married (Elizabeth had excluded his wife from court). When Dudley’s wife was found dead with her neck broken at the foot of a staircase in September, Dudley was suspected of murdering her in order to be free to marry the Queen.

A jury returned a verdict of misadventure, but Elizabeth was politician enough to know that she could never marry Dudley. She continued to depend on him, however, for the rest of her life. By 1563 he was a member of her Privy Council and in 1564 Elizabeth made him Earl of Leicester. She may have done this as part of a plan to marry him to Mary Queen of Scots, but Mary married Lord Darnley. Leicester was the first and greatest of her ‘favourites’ and she was devastated by his death in 1588.