Elizabeth, deeply affected by the death of the Earl of Leicester, had locked herself in her apartment for a few days until Lord Burghley had the door broken.

Her nickname for Dudley was "Eyes", symbolized by the sign of ôô in their letters to each other.

Elizabeth keeps the letter he had sent her six days before his death in her bedside treasure box, endorsing it with "his last letter" on the outside.

It will still be there when she dies fifteen years later.

In the Armada Portrait, the name of any of three surviving versions of an allegorical panel painting depicting the Tudor queen surrounded by symbols of imperial majesty against a backdrop representing the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, she possibly wears the necklace of six hundred pearls the Earl had bequeathed to her in his will.

The version at Woburn Abbey, the seat of the Dukes of Bedford, was until the second decade of the twenty-first century generally accepted as the work of George Gower, a fashionable court portraitist who in 1581 had been appointed Serjeant Painter.

The version in the National Portrait Gallery, London, which has been cut down at both sides leaving just a portrait of the queen, was also attributed to Gower.

The earl’s handsome and dashing young stepson Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, had first come to court in 1584, and by 1587 had become a favorite of the Queen, who relishes his lively mind and eloquence, as well as his skills as a showman and in courtly love.

He had replaced the Leicester in June 1587 as Master of the Horse.

He had underestimated the Queen, however, and his later behavior towards her lacks due respect and shows disdain for the influence of her principal secretary, Sir Robert Cecil.

On one occasion during a heated Privy Council debate on the problems in Ireland, the Queen reportedly cuffed an insolent Essex round the ear, prompting him to draw his sword on her.

After Leicester's death in 1588, the Queen transfers to Essex the royal monopoly on sweet wines, which the late Earl had held; by this Essex can profit from collecting taxes.