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THE GENTRY OF NORTH WALES AND THE EARL OF LEICESTER'S EXPEDITION TO THE NETHERLANDS, 1585-15861 THE activities of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, in north Wales in the later sixteenth century have been surrounded with scarcely less controversy than has his career in national politics. A substantial reappraisal of his political career has been long overdue. In the history of north Wales the legend of the rapacious courtier lives on (one need only recall the commissions for the encroachment of the forest of Snowdon, the feud with Sir Richard Bulkeley of Beaumaris and the persecution of the gentry of Llyn). Given this situation it should have been with unmixed relief that the victims of his rapacity viewed his departure for the Netherlands in December 1585. Yet, on that occasion he was accompanied by a sizeable contingent of gentry from north Wales. The composition of this contingent, and the light it sheds on Leicester's relations with the gentry of north Wales, forms the subject of this essay.2 Essential to an understanding of the contingent is an appreciation of the structure of Leicester's interests in north Wales and of the structure of the army he commanded in 1585-86. The powerful territorial interest that he wielded was based on a series of royal grants of land and offices: the lordships of Denbigh and Chirk (June 1563), the chamberlainship of the county palatine of Chester (July 1565), the chief forestership of Snowdon (late 1560s), and the lordships of Arwystli and Cyfeiliog in Montgomeryshire (April 1572). In June 1564 his brother Ambrose, earl of Warwick was granted the lordship of Ruthin (Dyffryn Clwyd).3 These were buttressed by grants of ex-monastic property: the manor of Halton in Denbighshire (formerly of the abbey of Valle Crucis), and lands of the abbeys of Cymer and Bardsey in Merioneth and Caernarvon- shire.4 By the early 1580s the annual rent roll for his estates in north 1 I would like to thank Miss Enid Pierce Roberts and Mr. W. K. Williams-Jones of the University College of North Wales for their kind assistance and advice. 2 In his important study 'North Wales in the Essex Revolt of 1601', English Historical Review, LIX (1944), Professor A. H. Dodd drew attention to the north Welshmen who accompanied Sir William Stanley in his defection in 1587. Stanley, however, had permission to choose his own officers for the 1,000 Irish troops he raised, and these men should be seen as followers of Stanley rather than of Leicester. Hence they will not be discussed here. See Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, 1585-86, p. 253. » Calendar of the Patent Rolls, 1560-63, pp. 534-43; 1563-66, pp. 59, 312; 1569-72, p. 472. No definite grant of the forestership of Snowdon has survived. « Halton was granted in June 1566, National Library of Wales, Chirk Castle MS. F.5599. For Cymer Abbey lands, see, e.g., N.L.W., Peniarth Deeds 473; for Bardsey lands, University College of North Wales Library, Nannau MS. 1560.