In January, she arrived at court accompanied by her guardian's wife, Catherine, Countess of Huntingdon, who was Leicester's sister and Sidney's aunt.

Many of the poems were circulated in manuscript form before the first edition was printed by Thomas Newman in 1591, five years after Sidney's death.

[13] Poet Richard Barnfield dedicated The Affectionate Shepherd, his first work, which was published anonymously in November 1594, to Penelope Rich.

[8] Bartholomew Yong dedicated his translation of Portuguese author Jorge de Montemor's The Seven Books of the Diana (1598) to her; and sonnets are addressed to her by John Davies of Hereford.

Penelope's arranged marriage to Rich had been unhappy, and by 1595 she began a secret affair with Charles Blount, 8th Baron Mountjoy.

Lord Rich took no action during the lifetime of Penelope's brother, the powerful Earl of Essex, who became the ageing Queen's favourite in the years after the death of Leicester in 1588.

Essex shocked many people, after the failure of his rebellion, by denouncing her as a traitor, and after his execution for treason in 1601, Lord Rich had Penelope and her children by Mountjoy cast out.

Mountjoy, like Penelope, had been implicated in the Essex rebellion, but the Queen, who wished to show as much clemency as possible to the rebels, took no action against either of them.

[3] She was among the ladies who rode north to Berwick-upon-Tweed to meet Anne of Denmark in May 1603 and escorted the new queen on her entry to London.

[8][10] The French ambassador the Marquis de Rosny identified her as an influential courtier, and gave her a diamond-set miniature portrait of Henry IV of France.

She married Blount in a private ceremony conducted by his chaplain, William Laud, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, on 26 December 1605 at Wanstead House in London.