Elizabeth Brydges

[5] Around this time Brydges may have had some kind of affair with Essex, possibly to be identified as the woman noted by Rowland Whyte as "his fairest B.

Queen Elizabeth was very angry and used "words and blows" against Brydges, and both women were suspended from their duties for three days and had to lodge outside the palace.

In June 1602 her cousin, Grey Brydges, who became Baron Chandos, disputed her claims on the family estate, and he attacked and injured her representative Ambrose Willoughby during a legal meeting.

[10] After the death of Queen Elizabeth, Brydges and other women went to see King James at Theobalds where, according to Anne Clifford as a sign of the changing times, they were "all lousy" by waiting in Sir Thomas Erskine's chamber.

[12] Later in 1603 she married Sir John Kennedy, a Scottish member of the household of King James recently naturalised by Parliament as an Englishman.

Kennedy was still in favour at court and took part in the masque The Hue and Cry After Cupid on 9 February 1608, so presumably his troubles started in earnest after that date.

[18] They escaped via the back door in a state of undress and found safety in the house of her cousin Elizabeth, wife of Arthur Gorges at Chelsea.

[22] The circumstances were obscure at the time, and in November 1609 the King and the Chancellor of Scotland, Alexander Seton, 1st Earl of Dunfermline, discussed how Kennedy should make a solemn oath about his first wedding, which might then reveal if it were possible to dissolve the present marriage as was wished, or not.

[28][29] An old version of her story lays emphasis on Brydges as a spendthrift and Kennedy unable to satisfy her wants, seeking to extricate himself from the marriage by any means, with the help of the lawyer Francis Bacon.

[31] In 1615 Kennedy and Sir George Belgrave were put in the Gatehouse Prison for falsely accusing a gentleman of slandering the Duke of Lennox and the Scots at court.

[36] In another portrait at Woburn of Elizabeth Brydges, attributed in the nineteenth-century to Daniel Mytens or more plausibly Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, her stomacher is ornamented with six-pointed stars edged with pearls.