Contributions
Robert Dudley was the man Queen Elizabeth I most likely loved above all others. Son of the Duke of Northumberland, who fell for trying to place Jane Grey on the throne, he knew the Tower and disgrace before the accession of Elizabeth, his childhood friend, raised him to the first rank. Made Master of the Horse in 1558 and Earl of Leicester in 1564, he remained for three decades the queen's favourite, long thought a possible husband. A great Renaissance lord, he was above all a magnificent patron: he protected companies of players - the "Leicester's Men," among the first licensed professional troupes in England - supported poets, scholars and explorers, and made his houses centres of culture. Chancellor of the University of Oxford and a zealous champion of the Protestant cause, he commanded in 1585-1587 the English expedition to the Netherlands against Spain, a costly and militarily unhappy venture.
Significance
Dudley holds a singular place: less for his acts of state, often disputed, than for his role as a catalyst of Elizabethan culture and for the enigma of his bond with the queen. His patronage of the theatre was decisive: by maintaining a permanent, licensed troupe, he helped make playing a respectable craft, preparing the ground from which, a generation later, Shakespeare's theatre would spring. The sumptuous entertainments he gave Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle in 1575 - nineteen days of banquets, fireworks and water pageants - became legendary and marked the imagination of the age. His shadow is deep. The suspicious death of his first wife, Amy Robsart, found at the foot of a staircase in 1560, fed rumours that pursued him all his life and likely weighed on his chances of marrying the queen. Ambitious, extravagant, at times a careless commander, he disappointed in the Netherlands. But the constancy of Elizabeth's affection - keeping after his death in 1588 his last letter in a casket marked "his last letter" - tells well enough the unique place he held in the reign.
Influence
His patronage of theatre and letters nourished the Elizabethan cultural flowering: the Leicester's Men opened the way for the great companies of the century's end. Protector of poets such as Edmund Spenser and of his nephew Philip Sidney, and champion of militant Protestantism, he embodies the great lord-patron whose support made the rise of the arts possible.
Anecdote
In July 1575, to charm the queen and perhaps still to win her hand, Dudley turned his castle of Kenilworth into the stage of a nineteen-day entertainment: a clock frozen at the banquet hour, ladies of the lake rising from the water, fireworks. Elizabeth left with no promise of marriage. Thirteen years later, on hearing of his death, she shut herself in her chamber; the door, it is said, had to be forced. She kept until her own death the last letter he had written to her.