An exceptionally rare letter from Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, to Queen Elizabeth I set a new auction record for itself when it sold for $59,000 at UK auction house Lyon & Turnbull in February. The letter had most recently appeared at auction in 2022, when Sotheby’s London hammered it down for $17,000 – quite a nice little profit in three years for the vendor. The letter, which was dated 1584, shows Leicester’s desire to remain in the queen’s favour (he was her lifelong favourite), with concern for the monarch’s health and a reference to an unidentified matter of state that he thought might present a threat to her life; auctioneer specialist Dominic Somerville-Brown suggesting that it could well have been the conspiracy between English Catholics and continental powers to overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots.
Dudley was both handsome and immensely ambitious. Elizabeth I made him Master of the horse and in 1559 he was elevated to privy councillor and Knight of the Garter. The queen made him Earl of Leicester in 1564, four years after his first wife died in suspicious circumstances. Despite being an abject failure at military command when sent to command a force of 6000 troops in the Netherlands in 1585, in 1588 Elizabeth appointed Dudley lieutenant general of an army against the Spanish Armada. He died suddenly later that year.
