This lady succeeded the unhappy Frances Howard as the wife of the Earl of Essex, and has much to complain of from her historian, Arthur Wilson, who does not scruple to take away her character, calling her “a malicious piece of vanity,” and giving credit to all the reports which, believed by her husband, were the cause of their separation, after a marriage of four years.

The person and character of Lord Essex are so variously described by contemporary authors, that it is difficult to form a correct judgment of what he really was. That he was unfortunate in both his marriages is all that is positively known, and even his conduct as a soldier has been called in question—not as regarded his bravery, but his genius for war. For warlike pursuits he, however, had a decided bias; and, though he is sometimes represented as peculiarly soft and agreeable to the female sex, he does not seem to have managed to make himself beloved; it is true, an opposite account describes him as “peculiarly harsh and disagreeable to women.” So that he stands in the paradoxical predicament of Catherine de Medicis—

Some time after he was separated from the degraded Frances, he went to spend his Christmas at a country house of the Earl of Hertford's, where the gloom and melancholy caused by his wrongs were dissipated, and a dawn of happiness broke on him, in the sight of a beautiful girl, “full of harmless sweetness, affable, and gentle,” and unknowing in the ways of the world, or the vice and falsehood of a Court.