Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/453

 Leicester entertained the queen there; that on the queen's departure from Kenilworth, the countess, in her husband's absence, received her sovereign at Chartley (6 Aug.); that Leicester showed himself anxious in March 1576 for Essex's return to Ireland, and that on 21 Sept. 1578 Leicester and the widowed countess were married. But although it is probable that Essex and his wife were not on affectionate terms, there is no proof that the countess intrigued with Leicester in her husband's lifetime. By her second marriage she had a son, who died in 1584. After Leicester's death (4 Sept. 1588) she married a third husband, Sir Christopher Blount [q. v.], in July 1589. He was executed in 1601 for his connection with the plot of her son, Robert, ssecond earl of Essex, and she lived a widow till her death at the age of ninety-four on 25 Dec. 1634. She was buried by the side of Leicester at Warwick. Two daughters and two sons survived Essex. His elder daughter, Penelope, he desired to see matched to Sir Henry Sidney's famous son Philip, with whom he was on intimate terms, but she married Lord Rich in 1580, and subsequently Charles Blount [q. v.], lord Mountjoy. The second daughter, Dorothy, first, privately married, in July 1583, Sir Thomas, son of Sir John Perrot, well known in Irish history (cf. STRYPE, Aylmer); and, secondly, Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland, in 1595. She died 3 Aug. 1619. The elder son, Robert, is separately noticed. Walter, the younger son, born in 1569, was entered at Christ Church, Oxford, 12 June 1584, and was killed in a skirmish before Rouen, 8 Sept. 1591. He married Margaret, daughter of Arthur Dakin, but had no issue.

The testimony of Sir Henry Sidney, of Burghley, and of those who served with Essex in Ulster, proves him to have been exceptionally courageous. He shared without complaint the famine and long exposure to which his men were constantly subjected. But his failure in Ireland was due as much to his lack of foresight and irrational enthusiasm at the outset as to the subsequent hesitation of the home authorities and the jealousy of Lord-deputy Fitzwilliam. The sanguinary, and often treacherous, policy which Essex pursued towards the native Irish was in accord with popular feeling, but no English official practised it more wantonly than Essex did in the capture of MacPhelim and the attack on Rathlin. Davies, the author of the funeral sermon, says that Essex was learned in history and genealogy, and ‘excelled in describing and blazing of arms.’ On his deathbed he sang, according to Waterhouse, a hymn of his own composition. In Addit. MS. 5830, f. 122, in Sloane MS. 1896, f. 58, and in the Gough MSS. in the Bodleian Library, there are sixteenth-century copies of a poem attributed to Essex which has been identified with the one mentioned by Waterhouse. These verses were, however, printed as ‘The Compleynt of a Sinner’ in the ‘Paradise of Dainty Devices’ (1576), above the initials F. K., i. e. Francis Kinwelmersh, Gascoigne's friend. Some doubt attaches to their authorship (see Notes and Queries, 4th ser. iii. 361). They are printed as Essex's work in Farr's ‘Select Poetry of the Reign of Elizabeth,’ i. 316, and in Dr. Grosart's ‘Fuller Worthies Miscellany,’ iv. 102–6. Mr. J. P. Collier, reprinting them from the Gough MSS., in the ‘Camden Society Miscellany,’ vol. iii. (1855), is inclined to credit Kinwelmersh with them. There is a portrait of Essex by Zucchero, and an engraving appears in Holland's ‘Herωologia.’

[Devereux's Lives of the Devereux earls of Essex, vol. i., where most of Essex's letters to the council from Ireland are printed at length; Bagwell's Ireland under the Tudors, ii.; Froude's Hist.; Cal. of Carew MSS. with Introduction; Cal. of Irish State Papers, 1573–6, with Introduction; E. P. Shirley's Hist. of Monaghan; Annals of the Four Masters, ed. O'Donovan; Bagot's Memorials of the Bagot Family (letters describing Essex's return to Ireland and death), 1823, pp. 29–30; George Hill's Macdonnells of Antrim (1873), pp. 152–5, 416–21; information kindly supplied by Mr. R. Dunlop.] 

DEVEY, GEORGE (1820–1886), architect, was born in London in 1820, travelled in Italy and Greece, and the experience he thus acquired, joined to his artistic talents, aided him considerably in making designs for country houses. He was principally known by the successful manner in which he added to and altered many of the English mansions. Among these may be mentioned those of the Duke of Argyll, Lord Granville, Lord Rosebery, Lord Wolverton, Lord Revelstoke, Lord Kenmare, and others. He died at Hastings in November 1886. He was a fellow of the Royal Institute of Architects, and exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1841 and 1848.

[Times, 23 Nov. 1886, p. 6; Builder, 1886, p. 728.] 

DEVIS, ARTHUR (1711?–1787), portrait-painter, was born about 1711 at Preston in Lancashire, and was a pupil of Peter Tillemans. He exhibited at the Free Society of Artists twenty works, chiefly portraits, between 1762 and 1780. He also was employed to restore Sir James Thornhill's paintings in