Welsh Journals

THE ESSEX INHERITANCE ON 8 February 1601 the crumbling career of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, finally collapsed in the Essex Revolt. Assess- ments of that career and its denouement have usually focused upon the earl's personal weaknesses: his extravagance, his irresponsibility, his ungovernable ambition. But despite study of a few of its features by serious scholars,1 and its more general attraction for flights of fancy by popular historians, many aspects of Essex's career remain obscure, not least its background. The earl had succeeded his father at the age of nine. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, his maternal grandfather, one of the trustees of his estate under his father's will,2 warned him 'that by unhappy occasions your father hath not left you sufficient lands for to maintain the state of the poorest Earl in England; and also you are so far from goods and riches left unto you by your father, that you are left more in debt than one quarter of your land, to be sold by you, is able to discharge your debt'. Students of Essex have observed that his father's adventures in Ireland, from 1573 to his death in 1576, contributed to these unhappy circumstances, largely through his having borrowed from the queen £ 10,000 upon the security of English lands worth £ 500 a year.4 But why the first earl should have embarked upon those ruinous adventures has never been satisfactorily explained. Moreover, on the one hand, the earlier history of the Devereux has scarcely been explored at all; and, on the other, the management of the second earl's estate during his minority has not been investigated. These are important matters in relation to the latter's career. They are also important in relation to the broader question of the 'crisis of the aristocracy' in early-modern England. The Devereux in general, and the second earl in particular, occupy a prominent place in Professor Lawrence Stone's magisterial study of that 'crisis'. The family is cited in illustration of significant points in Stone's thesis, as one of those that rose through marriage with heiresses, or were burdened through having to pay out jointures, or 1 L. W. Henry has considered Essex's military thinking ('The Earl of Essex as Strategist and Military Organiser (1596-7)', English Historical Review, LXVIII (1953), 363-93); Patrick Collinson, his connection with Puritanism ('The Puritan Classical Movement in the reign of Elizabeth I' (University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1957, pp. 1,200-20). 1 L[ongleat House,] D[evereux Papers], Box IV, no. 59. [W.B.] Devereux, [Lives and Letters of the Devereux Earls of Essex, Vol. I (London, 1853)], p. 178. • Ibid., pp. 26-29; [L.] Stone, [The] Crisis [of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965)], pp. 455, 424.