also present in July 1575 when Dudley entertained the Queen with a magnificent 19-days festival at the castle. Elizabeth and the court (including the Earl of Leicester) then progressed to Chartley, where they were welcomed by the Countess of Essex. When Walter Devereux returned to England in December 1575, the Spanish agent in London, Antonio de Guaras, reported:As the thing is publicly talked of in the streets, there can be no harm in my writing openly about the great enmity between the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex, in consequence, it is said, of the fact that while Essex was in Ireland his wife had two children by Leicester. ... Great discord is expected in consequence. These rumours were elaborated on years later in Leicester's Commonwealth, a Catholic underground libel against the Protestant Earl of Leicester that satirically detailed his alleged enormities. Here the Countess of Essex, after having a daughter by Leicester, kills a second child "cruelly and unnaturally" by abortion to prevent her homecoming husband from discovering her affair. There is no evidence that any such children ever existed. The Earl of Essex returned to Ireland in July 1576. At Dublin, he died of dysentery on 22 September during an epidemic, bemoaning the "frailness of women" in his last words. Rumours of poison, administered by Leicester, immediately sprang up and continued, notwithstanding an official investigation which concluded that Essex had died of natural causes. His body was carried over to Carmarthen, where his widow attended the funeral. The Countess' jointure, the lands left to her under her husband's will, was too little to live by and did not comprise Chartley, so that she and her children had to seek accommodation elsewhere. She partly lived in her father's house at Rotherfield Greys, but also with friends; Leicester's Commonwealth claimed that Leicester had her move "up and down the country from house to house by privy ways". She pleaded for an augmentation of her jointure with the authorities and, to reach a compromise with the late Earl's executors, threatened "by some froward advice" to claim her dower rights. These would have amounted to one third of the Devereux estate. After seven months of wrangling, she reached a more satisfactory settlement, the Countess declaring to be "content to respect my children more than myself". She equally—though unsuccessfully—tried to move the Queen to forgive Essex' debts to the Crown, which